You could always swap out crons, syslog, init systems, and it would not affect Gnome.
That just isn’t true. Both GNOME and KDE already have hard dependencies on systemd-logind. GNOME hasn’t supported non-systemd Unixes since 2015! The only reason it works is that the elogind project provides a systemd-logind implementation decoupled from the rest of systemd. The GNOME team has elected to give users of elogind (despite not being officially supported) advance warning that they’ll have to do some amount of extra work in the future if they want to ship GNOME 50. Honestly I think that’s quite fair of them.
There are more GNOME features that don’t work without systemd even if it launches, like application isolation using systemd scopes. Fundamentally this is about not having to reinvent the world. Why should every DE have bespoke implementations of user, login and service managers instead of just using the ones that 99% of user systems already have?
You could make the same kind of articles for the old coreutils if you really wanted to. Just creatively “rewording” the bugfixes from the recent 9.8 release:
tail --pid
may race with reused PIDs]I feel like the reactions regarding
uutils
are a bit… off in general. There seem to be a lot of people who are pathologically negative towards open source projects for, frankly, bullshit reasons, like vague complaints about “Rust evangelism” (what?) or how permissive licensing is against the spirit of open source (WTF).Phoronix isn’t helping with these clickbait articles which border on content farming and their failure to moderate their comments of course, but these negative attitudes seems to cut across sites, also including Lemmy, Reddit and even Hackernews.
The
uutils
team seems to be doing well but it makes me sad to think about any aspiring open source devs without corporate backing reading such drivel.