Comment by simoncion

> I was under the impression that gnome requires it.

It doesn't seem to require it at this moment. I have "-systemd" in my USE flags, and have neither sys-apps/systemd nor gnome-base/gnome currently installed. After enabling several USE flags that have nothing to do with systemd [0], emerge was quite happy to offer to install gnome-base/gnome and its dependencies, and absolutely did not offer to install systemd.

Honestly, I don't even know if GNOME has a hard dependency on Wayland... I see many of the dependent packages in the 'gnome-*' categories have an "X" USE flag. I CBA to investigate, though.

Is KDE Plasma building in hard systemd requirements, or is it just building in hard Wayland requirements? I'd known about the latter [1] and -because I'd thought it was important to the KDE folks that KDE runs on BSD- would be surprised if they irreversibly tethered themselves to systemd.

[0] introspection pulseaudio vala server screencast wayland theora eds egl gles2

[1] Though do note that the same blog post that announced the change in policy for Plasma also announced that no other KDE software was going to have a hard dependency on Wayland for the foreseeable future.