14 DAY TRIAL // We have recently stumbled upon a new project on GitHub, called GNOME Without Systemd, which promises to deliver a systemd-free experience of the GNOME desktop environment to Gentoo and Funtoo Linux users.
The GNOME Without Systemd project, which is, in fact, a collection of useful information on how to install GNOME without the systemd init system, saw its initial commit this past weekend, on April 16, 2016. You may want to know that it appears to have been put together by Dantrell B., a contributor to the Gentoo Linux and Gentoo Linux operating systems.
End users are promised a full GNOME desktop environment experience without systemd on their Gentoo and Funtoo Linux installations. The OpenRC init system, ConsoleKit framework for defining and tracking users, login sessions, and seats, as well as UPower with Power Management Utilities (pm-utils) support are used instead.
"Searching for information on this subject in places other than my official contributions on Gentoo Linux and Funtoo Linux will turn up information that is in many cases almost entirely dead wrong," the developer has explained. "So let me emphasize that this is indeed the full GNOME experience without systemd."
GNOME 3.20 support is almost ready
If you're using the Gentoo Linux or Funtoo Linux operating systems and you hate the systemd init system, we recommend that you take a look at the instructions provided on the "GNOME Without Systemd" project. At the moment of writing this article, the supported GNOME versions are 3.14, 3.16, 3.18, and 3.20.
However, the GNOME 3.16, 3.18, and 3.20 versions appear to need a few more refinements before they're considered finished, but users can still install them. We cannot guarantee that you'll have a full GNOME experience without systemd using the respective instructions because we haven't tested it, so you're doing it at your own risk.