How KDE Plasma 5 Optionally Uses systemd

[phoronix]

Phoronix: How KDE Plasma 5 Optionally Uses systemd

For those wondering how KDE Plasma 5 -- and other desktop environments -- have come to begin utilizing systemd,..

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...lasma5-Systemd

[Emdek]

Uhm, I don't expect any direct dependencies (not mandatory ones, as long as distros will package it correctly), there were always abstractions like Solid etc.
Hopefully they will keep it that way or limit it only to desktop (Plasma + kwin), not libraries and applications (well, as long as they want to keep them running in MacOS and Windows too).

[gens]

... its continuously expanding set of features have become of interest to KDE and GNOME developers.
... and device management while allowing the X.Org Server to run without root privileges.

systemd is made for gnome with gnome and.. idk
you can read it in the exchanges between gnome and poettering when this all started
in short, nobody asked, for example, LXDE devs

XORG SERVER CAN RUN WITHOUT ROOT PRIVILEGES EVER SINCE THE KMS THING (a long time ago)
only "problem" is input
since input are files, their permissions can't be changed on the fly
(so it's not a problem on a single user computer, but with multiple users at the same time)
so input had to be either filtered through X or by giving a user privileges to read those files (so either X as another user or an easy to make global keylogger)
console-kit solved it very poorly (if you opened a file and another user became "active", you would still have permissions to that file(a sound card is a file, for example))
from what i see logind "solved" it with PAM (the design is sane but PAM sucks)

libinput might properly solve this problem once and for all
(there are other things that can be done, like kernel namespaces (that you can't use under systemd, at least not if you use LXC containers (that systemd uses)))

so just please stop saying that systemd lets you run X rootless
it was made possible by other people for other reasons
systemd just glued it together and said "i did it, it was all me"


sorry for the harsh tone, just that misinformation like this gets to me


edit: PS a rainbow ? rly ? what is this a childrens cartoon about talking horses ?

[LoneVVolf]

Conclusions

Hopefully it clears up what we mean when we talk about systemd and desktop environments, and where we could use different parts of systemd.

It should be apparent that as developers there are parts we want to embrace as it. In many cases it allows us to throw away large amounts of code whilst at the same time providing a better user experience. Adding it as an optional extra defeats the main benefit.


As maintainers we have a duty to balance what will provide the best experience for the majority of our Plasma users without leaving anyone with a broken system. Projects like this bring the interfaces we need to BSD and as it gets more stable we should be able to start distributing features.

(Emphasis added by me).

Logind has some great options, but it also has 1 immense disadvantage :
It only functions if systemd is PID 1 .

I was thinking of giving KDE another try with KF5 / plasma-next, but if they follow this path i'll stay with using some KDE applications in a WM.
(I run archlinux , but switched from sysv to openrc when arch switched to systemd as default).

[Akka]

systemd is made for gnome with gnome and.. idk
you can read it in the exchanges between gnome and poettering when this all started
in short, nobody asked, for example, LXDE devs

XORG SERVER CAN RUN WITHOUT ROOT PRIVILEGES EVER SINCE THE KMS THING (a long time ago)
only "problem" is input
since input are files, their permissions can't be changed on the fly
(so it's not a problem on a single user computer, but with multiple users at the same time)
so input had to be either filtered through X or by giving a user privileges to read those files (so either X as another user or an easy to make global keylogger)
console-kit solved it very poorly (if you opened a file and another user became "active", you would still have permissions to that file(a sound card is a file, for example))
from what i see logind "solved" it with PAM (the design is sane but PAM sucks)

libinput might properly solve this problem once and for all
(there are other things that can be done, like kernel namespaces (that you can't use under systemd, at least not if you use LXC containers (that systemd uses)))

so just please stop saying that systemd lets you run X rootless
it was made possible by other people for other reasons
systemd just glued it together and said "i did it, it was all me"


sorry for the harsh tone, just that misinformation like this gets to me


edit: PS a rainbow ? rly ? what is this a childrens cartoon about talking horses ?

As I understands you still need something like logind with libinput.

[kaprikawn]

My interpretation of this...end users continue to complain about the scope of systemd whereas developers (and maintainers) continue to find its features useful and choose to incorporate them where appropriate.

[gens]

As I understands you still need something like logind with libinput.

for multiple users, as i understand yes
and i doubt logind handles it better then console-kit
(can't find any documentation on how it actually works, so can't be sure)

in my opinion a "proper" solution would be a small multiplexer-like input daemon that passes input events based on current permissions
(like what X does, but more isolated and fully multi-user aware)
even better if it were an in-kernel mechanism, as that would bring latency and overhead to a bare minimum
this would also cut-out some code out of X

PS plasma 5 works fully with just linux, and will continue to do so

[cjcox]

Hard to say for sure...

While difficult to pin down (like most of systemd), freedesktop.org, which is all about desktop environment interoperability seems to be in favor of systemd.

So.... this isn't a Gnome thing. I think it may a preferred freedesktop.org thing... but like I said, and like most of systemd, itself, hard to pin down....

[GreatEmerald]

Logind has some great options, but it also has 1 immense disadvantage :
It only functions if systemd is PID 1 .

Nope, it should work with cgmanager too. (Or else Debian would have upgrade problems, see: http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showt...-Wright-format )

[GreatEmerald]

Oh, and as for the topic, this is fantastic news. I can't wait until startkde (and friends) goes away. All the security and consistency improvements are awesome, too. Unfortunately it will probably take a long time...