Gnome 3.8 without systemd

gagern · n00b Joined: 26 Nov 2003 Posts: 54

In may day-to-day work I'm using KDE, with KDM as the display manager. But I like to keep a few other window managers and desktop environments around, so I can have a look at what things look like on these. Among the alternatives is Gnome, although I haven't started it in quite a while now. This morning my ~amd64 system world update greeted me with

Moderato · Posted: Mon Jul 29, 2013 5:22 pm Post subject:

Unfortunately, systemd seems to be getting a hard dependency of GNOME as of 3.8. GDM is utilizing it for restarting properly (although a changed /etc/init.d/xdm script would have sufficed as well... cf. https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=463784), but there's more.

gnome-shell is also having systemd as a hard dependency (http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/gnome-base/gnome-shell/gnome-shell-3.8.3-r2.ebuild?revision=1.4&view=markup) as well as some other packages I can't remember right now. Probably gnome-settings-daemon or the like.

This pretty much makes GNOME unusable on my system. systemd is hardmasked and it will stay that way, I won't let this cr* ever land on my system, lest start it or make it the default init application.

As far as I know, GNOME can be started from KDM just fine, also GDM is just using systemd for proper restart mechanisms. However, you'll need systemd for power and session management, also cf. https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=464944

It may be possible to rip that out, but you'll lose functionality.

I don't think there's hope for having GNOME 3.6 being maintained long-term.

But there's other hope: if I understood correctly, most of the pain is coming from the consolekit => logind (part of systemd) migration GNOME is currently going through. There may be other reasons, but the interesting point is that logind could work with OpenRC as well, it "just" needs a "fake systemd" to be already running and ripped out of systemd into its own ebuild, for being able to co-exist on a system with openrc and udev.

However, if systemd integration deepens in further GNOME versions, I guess we're out of luck.

I, for one, will try to find out if XFCE4 is an alternative, even though I'll pretty much have to lose the majority of GNOMEness. But if that's the price for not having to use systemd, I'd gladly try that...

Best regards,

Mihai

Naib · Posted: Mon Jul 29, 2013 11:05 pm Post subject:

yup, gnome have gone deep with an init manager... I had a painful day removing gnome and rebuilding -gnome
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kernelOfTruth · Posted: Sun May 03, 2015 10:29 pm Post subject:

well,

Funtoo seems capable to un-tangle Gnome from systemd

http://forums.funtoo.org/topic/111-gnome-312-is-here/

Would this also be an option for Gentoo ?

http://www.funtoo.org/GNOME_First_Steps

I'm curious to try out Gnome but NOT systemd - I'm rather content with openrc :roll:

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https://github.com/kernelOfTruth/pulseaudio-equalizer-ladspa

Hardcore Gentoo Linux user since 2004

Tony0945 · Posted: Sun May 03, 2015 11:33 pm Post subject:

franzf · Advocate Joined: 29 Mar 2005 Posts: 4565

You can have a look at how funtoo disables hard dep on systemd:
https://github.com/funtoo/funtoo-gnome-overlay/tree/master/gnome-base
gnome-control-center, gnome-settings-daemon and gnome-shell are good points to start. You will realise that the patches are HUGE, and mostly activate deprecated features. AFACS they also disable the posibility to set hostname and datetime/timezone in control center (depends on hostnamed/timezoned). The gnome parts that are patched mostly relate to power management. If you want to rely on the patch work it's OK. But you already have one post in the forum thread you linked regarding suspending on LID close - does not work with newest patches though it worked in the past.
Maintaing those patches IMHO is a huge task, especially for an under-staffed team like Gentoo-Gnome herd. AFAIR that was the central point in not taking the burden to support code paths no longer supported (and already removed) by upstream. Breaking experience and the users hardware is way too critical...

If you want to give gnome3 a try I would recommend using a VM (if you want to prevent portage from installing systemd).