[blueflow]

With everything depending on systemd interfaces, its an exhausting uphill battle to run anything desktop-like without systemd.

Want to run xterm? Requires Xorg. rootless Xorg requires udev, udev turned into a systemd component. want to run xterm without systemd? good luck, you are now the maintainer of your own LFS.

[cbolton]

The udev developers decided that it made sense to move udev into systemd. If you disagree and want choice, you can fork udev. Actually some people did that, so you can run xterm with eudev instead of udev and thus avoid systemd (though eudev seems hardly maintained now, with the latest release in 2023).

I think it's true that it's an exhausting battle to keep all those parts independent when 95% of the devs/money agree it's better to integrate them. But it wouldn't be fair either for the 5% to put on the others the burden of keeping things independent because of their own preferences...

[mid-kid]

eudev was just a copy of the udev part of systemd, with some patches to build on musl, and work without systemd. All of that has been upstreamed now, LFS has instructions on how to build udev from the latest systemd release, without building systemd itself.

[zbentley]

Yeah, it’s miserable; xterm shouldn’t require Xorg. It should be agnostic to display system and not force the X monoculture on everyone. Classic Microsoft gestapo tactics: shoehorn Xorg dependencies into tons of unrelated apps and thus curtail user freedom to run xterm with a WinForms or Wayland display system. It’s appalling.

[VladStanimir]

From the project documentation: "The xterm program is a terminal emulator for the X Window System." The application does not require xorg it requires an x11 server.

It just so happens that until recently xorg was the only game in town as far as Linux x11 servers are concerned.

[direwolf20]

xterm is literally x terminal but it's not systemd terminal

[yjftsjthsd-h]

xterm runs on Wayland and arcan; you should pick a different strawman

[embedding-shape]

> With everything depending on systemd interfaces, its an exhausting uphill battle to run anything desktop-like without systemd.

Yes, but this is hardly a unique systemd/Linux problem. I despise TypeScript for various reasons, always preferred vanilla JavaScript over TypeScript. So if I'm met with "Huh, this library is using TypeScript, am I ready to deal with that", I make the choice to not depend on that, even though half of the ecosystem uses TypeScript.

Going against the grain comes with more work probably, but this is also a choice we make, because we have strong feelings and opinions about something.

[direwolf20]

Languages are confined. I don't speak Rust — yet — so when I want to modify some software that is written in Rust that is a disappointment. However, the effect of software being written in Rust is limited to that software and its libraries. It doesn't infect your system the way systemd does.