The problem I have with this approach - keep everything compatible and portable - is that it holds back development and puts the effort in other parts of the stack to waste.

What is the point of awesome ‘new’ kernel features like cgroups if nothing in userspace really uses them? With systemd, I feel like my computer is actually taking advantage of being a modern Linux system, not just a warmed-over historical UNIX.

With Gnome using systemd, it can take advantage of those capabilities as as well.

If they do not depend on systemd, they have three options:

1. Don't have features that require its capabilities.

2. Have those features conditionally depending on whether systemd is present. This has at least 2 problems: inconsistent experience / feature set and maintenance of less-tested alternate code paths.

3. Implement fallbacks for systemd capabilities. This has more maintenance problems than (2), in addition to the redundant effort re-implementing (subsets of) features systemd provides.

I prefer to see the Gnome leverage systemd and build an excellent platform. With scarce resources, (2) and (3) are a significant drag on the project. 'Choice' is not only hard, it requires time/money, and that time/money comes at the expense of other things that would benefit from it.