Here’s something that’s both surprising and, in a way, not surprising at all, especially after yesterday’s announcement from KaOS, a distribution long known for its deep commitment to the KDE Plasma desktop, that it plans to move away from it. The main reason cited was KDE’s reliance on systemd in a specific component.
As expected, the news quickly gained traction, prompting KDE to clarify its dependence on systemd and which parts of the desktop environment rely on it. In a post on KDE’s Reddit community titled “A quick anti-FUD FAQ to debunk ‘the KDE is forcing systemd!’ hoax“, the contributor described the claims as misinformation and provided a short FAQ clarifying the project’s position.
As someone who relies on systemd, but wants to have alternatives:
While it is good that other login managers will still be able to start Plasma, making the default new login manager reliant on systemd is bad. It means that non-standard installations of KDE will now require more manual labor to make it work right. And while installing sddm is not big of a hassle, this sets a precedent that can later be expanded, making it a death by a thousand cuts for everything that dares not use systemd in its operation.