Plasma Login Manager was how the KDE developers planned to support remote Wayland sessions. And they will remove X11 sessions. Someone will have to add VNC and RDP to SDDM? Or is there another way?

However it does look as though KDE will depend on systemd more in the future. In which case it will gradually drop support for BSDs and Linux distros without systemd.

Universities have computer labs. Companies have shared computers. Households have shared computers.

> Are university computer labs with desktop computers still a thing?

Of course, people shouldn't be forced to bring or even have a laptop powerful enough for using during the classes or finishing their tasks.

> Genuine use cases for multiuser desktop Linux are exceedingly rare.

Not everyone is a rich american. People share computers.

> We are not sure where you folks are getting your info, but it is dead wrong.

> FreeBSD users will still be able to boot into Plasma with any other login manager that works on FreeBSD, including SDDM, which is upstream from Plasma anyway.

> Linux users will just have one more option.

> Plasma has no hard systemd dependencies.

cf. https://floss.social/@kde/115933236466022060

Yes. You can also continue to use SDDM.

SDDM will keep working, and KDE maintains a LightDM greeter. You don't even need to use a login manager, most people in the BSD space launch it from the tty

I almost feel like they do it on purpose just to piss off Bryan Lunduke.

It can. For now, at least.

it can yes

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Scope creep, violation of the Unix philosophy, large attack surface area, second system syndrome, interoperability concerns. It didn’t help that the creator’s other well-known project, PulseAudio, was also controversial at the time, for similar reasons.

Wrote about present day reasons to dislike systemd a few days ago on HN, which encompasses most arguments of actual substance[0] (tldr: Unix philosophy, it homogenizes distros and it may be too heavy for some low-resource environments).

Historic reasons mostly come down to systemds developers being abrasive jerks to people. Systemd has some weird behavior choices that only really make sense from the perspective where every computer is a desktop; ie. it terminates all processes spawned by a user when logging out unless they were made in a specific way with systemd-run. This makes sense on a desktop - users log out, you want everything they did to be cleaned up. On a server it makes less sense, since you probably want a tmux/screen session to keep running when you sign out of your ssh session (either by choice as a monitoring tool, or alternatively because you have an unstable connection and need a persistent shell).

Every downstream distro got surprised by this change[1] and nowadays just ships a default configuration that turns it off, because upstream systemd developers weren't interested in hearing the complaints.

Most of these footguns have been ironed out over the years though.

There's also some really dumb arguments to dislike systemd, most of which just can be summarized as "people have an axe to grind with Lennart Poettering for some reason".

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46794562

[1]: It was always available, but suddenly turned on by default in an update.

To over-simplify, it's about conflicting philosophical alignment:

- systemd: integration and features at the cost of complexity and scope

- traditional: simplicity and composability at the cost of boot speed and convenience

systemd conflicts against the more traditional unix philosophies as well as minimalism.

PAM is indeed a minefield.

A while back I lost a system because I had it configured with full disk encryption and pam_usb for totp-enhanced logins. A bugged update that I applied via pacman broke PAM and I lost my ability to login. This would have been just annoying and not catastrophic had I not also had FDE and forgotten where I stored my LUKS key.

Lesson learned.

lol, sounds like you've got extra something

The Reddit thread had comments of 2 KDE developers and a link to the merged merge request removing FreeBSD support.

Yeah, elogind + sddm is what I'm running on Void Linux with KDE.

Yeah, if you want initd support work it on your own , its opensource anyways (and initd is too basic to do any of those advanced features of systemd)

Are there still a lot Linux distros that don't use systemd?

They’re not. This is one new and entirely optional login manager. Nothing that is already available is changing

No, Plasma Login Manager relies on systemd. SDDM and any other login manager doesn't. You can still use KDE.

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