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GNOME 49 Will Require Deeper systemd Integration
Quoting: GNOME 49 Will Require Deeper systemd Integration —
GNOME’s relationship with systemd has been debated among Linux users and distributions for years. While the desktop environment hasn’t officially required systemd for core functionality, many of its components have leaned heavily on systemd’s ecosystem, particularly logind, its session management service.
Now, GNOME is taking further steps to deepen its integration with systemd, a move that will make running the desktop on alternative init systems significantly more difficult.
To be clear, GNOME hasn’t been entirely systemd-agnostic for a while. Since 2015, it has relied on logind for session and seat management, dropping support for the older ConsoleKit. However, logind doesn’t have to run under systemd—projects like elogind have allowed GNOME to function on systems running OpenRC, runit, or BSD init.
OMG Ubuntu:
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GNOME 49 Makes Papers a Core App, Replacing Evince - OMG! Ubuntu
The GNOME 49 Alpha release will ship Papers as a GNOME Core App, replacing Evince (also, as I reported back in May, Totem is replaced by Showtime in GNOME 49, and Manuals replaces Devhelp in the core-devel-tools set).
For app swaps in GNOME development releases, they must be made them before the first alpha. The nature of development means decisions get made early but tentatively. If testing throws up issues which can’t be worked through in time, revert is possible.
If the testing of Papers goes well during the alpha, the stable GNOME 49 release will include Papers as a Core App. Though Linux distributions aren’t required to preinstall all Core Apps, a document viewer is an essential tool so most will.
Ubuntu already uses Papers so whatever happens in GNOME 49, Ubuntu 25.10 will offer it.
But with more attention on Papers upstream, any gloss, polish and improvements the app receives will benefit downstream users — and there are already some great improvements waiting.