The systemd is a make dependency only. Unless you plan on compiling it yourself, you don't need systemd to run it. ~ $ y -Qi libutil-linux | grep Depends

The systemd is a make dependency only. Unless you plan on compiling it yourself, you don't need systemd to run it. ~ $ y -Qi libutil-linux | grep Depends Depends On : None EDIT: conversely, these are the packages depending on systemd: ~ $ y -Qi systemd | grep Required | fmt Required By : accountsservice chromium colord crda cups device-mapper gnome-session lib32-systemd libgdm libgusb libpulse libusb libvirt libwacom lvm2 media-player-info mesa mkinitcpio netctl polkit procps-ng qt5-base qtwebkit rtkit spotify subversion systemd-sysvcompat udisks2 upower xf86-input-evdev xf86-video-ati xf86-video-modesetting As a sysadmin and developer I don't understand this systemd-hate. If you ever have written a /etc/init.d script for a python non-daemoning script running in a virtualenv, or something to the same effect, you'd notice the improvement over SysV init scripts. Upstart is nice too, but as a Linux desktop user I love socket activation: I can have cups, avahi and other optional/non-critical daemons "active" but not actually using any resource, until effectively used by some other process.