I am running Debian unstable with sysvinit-core and KDE, and while the loss of functionality was quite visible the situation is slowly getting back to normal.

I am running Debian unstable with sysvinit-core and KDE, and while the loss of functionality was quite visible the situation is slowly getting back to normal. For example policykit was broken and things like mounting USB devices or managing VPN connections didn't work. That is finally fixed and with latest cgmanager from unstable, and policykit-1 from experimental those things work again. The only noticable loss compared to systemd is the lack of 'Suspend/Hibernate' in the KDE menu, but you can still use 'pm-suspend' from the cmdline, or even with 'qdbus' and the systemd specific dbus API, so in the end this should be fixable too. So I wouldn't put KDE into the same bucket as Gnome, its dependencies on systemd seem to be mostly indirect: * policykit, which started to depend on systemd-logind instead of consolekit. Works with cgmanager+systemd-shim as replacement * upowerd doesn't support suspend/hibernate anymore but apparently, so apparently systemd specific dbus methods have to be used now. Also Gnome3 works under OpenBSD (with consolekit?), and there is definitely no systemd there, although it might not be the latest version: http://callfortesting.org/gnome3/ http://callfortesting.org/gnome3/