As anyone who's used a language at least as modern as C will tell you, it's awfully nice when a runtime system will help you clean up when your task terminates.

As anyone who's used a language at least as modern as C will tell you, it's awfully nice when a runtime system will help you clean up when your task terminates. My beef with the article that the GGP links to is not that GDM now requires such a system (strategic laziness is a virtue!), but that the author refuses to admit that 1) There currently exists only one such runtime system that provides the behavior that GDM relies on. 2) There is absolutely no guarantee that the GDM folks won't come to rely on more systemd implementation detail in the future. Indeed, given the way Gnome development seems to happen, it's almost a certainty that GDM will depend on more and more systemd implementation detail in an entirely ad-hoc manner as time goes on.