If you can't opt out of systemd-resolved due to job policies, that's really not systemd's fault and there's nothing they can do to solve that situation. Why complain about it in that context?

What does this have to do with job policies? Systemd was forced down our throats by Red Hat adding hard dependencies on it to other software under their control, e.g., GNOME. Other distros then adopted systemd under duress, since many of the packages that Red Hat made depend on it are important to the Linux ecosystem, and the other distros didn't have the resources to fork them all.

> Systemd was forced down our throats by Red Hat […]

That's a very emotional take on the whole thing. As I saw it, systemd happened and the Ubuntu developers eventually concluded "well, that's better than upstart, let's use that." Plenty of other distros made the same rational decisions. Meanwhile, the GNOME developers thought "great, people are converging around a modern init system, we can actually integrate with it now," and so they did.

Also, GNOME is not under Red Hat's control. They contribute a lot, but the leadership rarely has a majority of Red Hat employees. While a large number of contributors work there (of course they would - Red Hat is big!), the majority are - again - from elsewhere. I can think of plenty of recent features that people assume are Red Hat driven and I can assure you they definitely are not.

What your take is doing is discounting a very large number of peoples' wisdom, time, and effort, by claiming their contributions are made as helpless victims of some conspiracy or as evil supporters of it. Both of these ideas are harmful.

> Meanwhile, the GNOME developers thought "great, people are converging around a modern init system, we can actually integrate with it now," and so they did.

> plenty of recent features that people assume are Red Hat driven and I can assure you they definitely are not.

My claim is specifically that the people who added the hard dependency on systemd to GNOME were Red Hat employees. I'm not talking at all on who wrote or merged any other code in it.

Your claims went further than that and it feels very disengenuous for you to try and walk them back now.

When was I ever talking about changes to GNOME other than the systemd dependency? What am I walking back?

> Systemd was forced down our throats by Red Hat adding hard dependencies on it to other software under their control, e.g., GNOME. Other distros then adopted systemd under duress

What utter drivel. I've participated in the discussions around systemd in various distributions. There was a huge amount of discussion, then one by one distributions switched. Some quickly, some took various years. Again, some distributions took various years to switch.

That you can only say things such as "forced down our throats" and "duress" says enough. Not capable to actually hold a discussion, let's be emotional and without any actual facts.

> That you can only say things such as "forced down our throats" and "duress" says enough. Not capable to actually hold a discussion, let's be emotional and without any actual facts.

Does this sound any better? Red Hat used their influence over GNOME (and other programs) to add a hard dependency on systemd to it. This forced other distros to either switch to systemd or drop support for GNOME. I suspect that had Red Hat employees not added hard dependencies on systemd to any other software, that no distributions other than Fedora and RHEL and its clones would require it.

Nope, it's still entirely incorrect. Again, the release team misjudged things. I was part of the GNOME release team at that time. We were actually warned about it, then misjudged it ("it'll be fine").

Further, it wasn't even a hard dependency. You're really not understanding components and APIs.

> This forced other distros to either switch to systemd or drop support for GNOME.

No, again entirely incorrect. GNOME runs without systemd. A few distributions worked on ensuring GNOME runs without it. It took a while to make that happen, so for a bit some distributions needed to keep some components back. But still: you're talking about systemd while it was an interaction of a few components. Systemd consists of loads of bits.

GNOME _runs_ on distributions without systemd! It took work to make that happen, we coordinated to ensure the problems would be solved.

> I suspect that had Red Hat employees not added hard dependencies on systemd to any other software, that no distributions other than Fedora and RHEL and its clones would require it.

Again, you're so incorrect it's not funny. Arch was really quick to switch to systemd. I help out with Mageia, they really wanted to switch as well, but it took (volunteer) time to make it happen. Opensuse took a while, but still, they would've switched.

The only unique ones were Ubuntu (political crap) and Debian (partly due to political influence by Ubuntu).

Systemd was selected on merit by loads of distributions, not this conspiracy thing you're pretending it to be.

Not GP.

The fact that it took _work_ to get GNOME to run without systemd is a bad thing in my book.

Also, to claim that systemd was selected on merit without anything backing up the claim of "merit" is disingenuous; plenty of worse solutions end up winning all the time.

It took work because systemd (more precisely logind) solved real problems and so the work had to be done again for the sake of non-systemd distros.

Can you tell me what problems logind solved? Because on my own machine, I don't have it, and I don't need it. In fact, it's a struggle to make sure it's not pulled in as a dependency of anything.

The point is that the replacements being talked about, systemd-resolved for dns, systemd-timesyncd for ntp, and systemd-networkd for whatever else you would prefer to use for network config, are not a mandatory part of systemd. You can use systemd without using these other components and it will work perfectly well with whatever other services you want to use for dns, ntp, and ip networking. These other services are not dependencies of GNOME, either.

People are conflating systemd itself with all the optional services it comes bundled with. I don't even believe resolved and networkd are enabled by default, at least not by the vendor. Whether a distro enables it depends on the distro.

You have to be an expert on systemd to figure out how not to use systemd.