You can always use a distro that doesn't use systemd or roll your own. Sure you lose the GNOME desktop environment, but if you ask me that's a net positive.

I agree, but this could be an issue with all distros based in the US. From my reading of these laws, I think the CA or NY or IL law could easily morph into a US National Law. So all US based distros may need to do something.

I saw an article that supporting these laws could cost a distro maintainer up to 10000 USD per year. Sadly I lost the link, but the article made a lot of sense to me. So, many small distos cannot afford even 1000/year, I think this law could kill almost all small Linux distros. That will probably leave only RHEL, SUSE and Ubuntu, maybe Debian, but they would need funds donated to them from Ubuntu.

If the distro is in another country like OpenBSD, they could just ignore the law(s). That of course assumes the "other" country does not replicate what is happening in the US.

Right now I am hoping these laws are declared unconstitutional, but to be honest, with support by companies like meta and twitter, I expect we will see a national law sometime in 2027.

So in the US, we could be looking at locked down OS, unless you want to break "the law".

I have been successfully using the GNOME desktop environment for years on Guix System which uses Shepherd as its init. KDE is an option too.

Other, more traditional distros are out there that work fine with GNOME, etc with no problems.