> In the end you are free to use any init system you want.

Not really

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Hard_dependencies_on_systemd

Honestly this list is way shorter than I would have expected before clicking, and most of it is very niche stuff (not on the scale of "the entirety of GNOME", for example). Also, some of the entries have notes like "likely usable without systemd if someone puts in the work".

Good catch, for reference I'm surprised they fixed this (which was my main worry):

> For versions 3.28 and earlier, the GNOME desktop environment contained components that required systemd-logind[5] (among them, notably, its display manager, GDM). However, as of version 3.30, Gentoo's packaging of GNOME allows it to work once again with sysvinit + OpenRC as the init system

I was happy ignoring systemd (and no, not depending on broken debian/redhat rc.d scripts) till my distro gave update that due to GNOME 3.8 they are forced to switch everything to systemd instead of keeping it optional like before.

It became a question of "are you going to have GNOME 3.8 or later, or not"

Not really, I currently run Gnome 3.40 without needing systemd on my machine. How? I use Gentoo.

Gentoo devs are sometimes a bit dedicated. Sincerely, long time user of Gentoo :)