Honestly, this just seems like a consequence of alternative init systems not keeping up
I’m not a fan of Gnome, they consistently have made questionable choices in my eyes since they shifted to their touch oriented layout circa 2010ish. While I personally dislike the software, I recognize its merit and that for many its the right choice. This is to say, the Following is NOT blind gnome hate. Additionally, I love systemd, I understand the philosophical issues with it, idgaf I like it.
This is bad. Like, big bad bad. The reason systemd is objectively fine as a monolithic giant Swiss army knife of software is because if people don’t want to use it they can replace it with something else. This move would require custom forks, moving forward, of gnome to retain interoperability with runit or with init, or with any selfspun init system.
The reason systemd isn’t a bad thing is that people don’t have to use it. This takes that choice away from anyone wanting to stay on gnome.
(I am a 20+ year Linux user and fan of systemd)
I don’t mind this because I don’t mind systemd but it kinda makes it feel eh… Like it’s not as modular. But then again if you want something modular you’re not gonna be choosing gnome
poor alpine users
Also Void Linux
Also gentoo openrc
My bet is that Gentoo will either cleave off just the necessary functionality from systemd and add it to logind, or produce the needed patches for Gnome.
rip chimera.
There are a bunch of non bloated alternatives with whether wayland compositors and also X11 window managers, and there’s also kde/plasma, xfce and mate if still wanting full DE, plus a hybrid lxde-gtk3/lxqt (lxqt supports both X11 and wayland I believe).
If going the non bloated ways, distributions can offer some modifications on the system configurations files, so that users can start with working software out of the box, and can even offer installation meta packages for a complete set of i3/sway packages to have an equivalent DE experience. What would be left to users is custom settings to get more appealing aesthetics depending on the user, if not i3/sway, then openbox/labwc, and so on. For a DE experience including into the meta package a toolbar like yambar (works on X11 and wayland), dunst/mako, udiskie, redshift/wlsunset and so on. The missing part on non bloated alternatives is easy of configuring through buttons and widgets, and even so lxqt made an easy of configure software component for openbox, and there might be something similar for labwc.
So non systemd distributions are far from dying because of gnome’s hostility.
And if I recall correctly, several gnome users (not its huge base of course) are moving away from gnome any ways unhappy with its plugin support, given gnome is known to leave plugins unsupported on its releases and not caring about them.
What you are calling “hostility” is just gnome not wanting to reinvent the wheel. Almost everyone uses systemd and it is easier to take advantage of existing features then it is to try and maintain more code.
