Q: Does the Plasma Login Manager require systemd to work?
A: Yes.
Q: So you ARE forcing Plasma users to use systemd!!?!?!
A: No. The Plasma Login Manager is one of probably half a dozen Login Managers (or more) that can boot Plasma. We made PLM because it will give distro creators a cool piece of kit that can (not “must”, not “should”: can) be tacked onto a system to boot into Plasma.
Q: So I don’t have to use PLM?
A: No! You can completely ignore PLM! Please be our guest and use any of the other non-systemd dependent LMs that will work and continue to work just fine, now and in the future.
Q: Is KDE planning on making any of Plasma’s core components dependent on systemd?
A: No.
Q: So Plasma does not and will not require systemd to work now or in the future?
A: That is correct.
Q: And it will continue to work on non-Linux systems like FreeBSD?
A: Also correct.
Q: Why have I been hearing that KDE will force systemd down everybody’s throats via Plasma then?
A: There are sad people who will do anything for attention and clicks, and will spread FUD and fake controversies to obtain them, including decontextualising comments on merge requests, stating as facts and official communications what are personal opinions, and finally straight up lying.
I would even be surprised if plasma-login-manager really has a dependency on systemd.
It is just much more likely that requires that certain setup steps have been taken care of externally and that come D-Bus interfaces are available.
In such cases the most convenient or readily-available solution could be the systemd eco-system with other approaches becoming viable after additional testing.
For example many login managers use the D-Bus interface initially introduced by systemd-logind which has since then also been provided by elogind and other alternatives.
which are coming soon, reducing PLM backend to very little.
The longer term plans is to move the abstraction layer slightly higher rather than in the backend and holding us back.
I had PLM-greeter running against greetd at some point, it’s trivial, probably in the history somewhere. My longer term plan is to push the frontend back up to plasma-workspace with the abstraction there.
