GNOME Desktop Environment No Longer Supported
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GNOME Desktop Environment No Longer Supported

Some of you have probably seen the blog post a few months ago about how GNOME is more strongly depending on systemd. The changes mentioned there have landed into the latest stable versions of the mentioned software (GNOME 49) and do affect us. In particular, the main culprit is the removal of the non-systemd fallback code in gnome-session. This makes it currently impossible to launch gnome-shell/mutter on a non-systemd system. A fairly straightforward patch of using elogind, like what was previously done, no longer works either.

Since we don’t have the time or interest to write a new non-systemd codepath for gnome-session, this means that all support for gnome-based desktops has to be dropped. In particular, the affected packages would be gnome-session, gnome-shell, mutter, and gnome-settings-daemon. For now, the old versions are still in the repos but because there is so much intertwining between other gtk/gnome packages, there is no guarantee they actually work and will later be removed from our repos.

Standalone gnome applications will still continue to be packaged, but it is simply not feasible anymore to support gnome desktops without systemd.

  • Oinks@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    21·
    9 hours ago

    You could always swap out crons, syslog, init systems, and it would not affect Gnome.

    That just isn’t true. Both GNOME and KDE already have hard dependencies on systemd-logind. GNOME hasn’t supported non-systemd Unixes since 2015! The only reason it works is that the elogind project provides a systemd-logind implementation decoupled from the rest of systemd. The GNOME team has elected to give users of elogind (despite not being officially supported) advance warning that they’ll have to do some amount of extra work in the future if they want to ship GNOME 50. Honestly I think that’s quite fair of them.

    There are more GNOME features that don’t work without systemd even if it launches, like application isolation using systemd scopes. Fundamentally this is about not having to reinvent the world. Why should every DE have bespoke implementations of user, login and service managers instead of just using the ones that 99% of user systems already have?