Red Hat produced systemd. Red Hat is the major contributor to Gnome. Gnome now refuses to run without systemd. Every major distro wants to carry Gnome, so...
Well, at least some distros offer a choice. Some other distros (Alpine, popular for containers, Void, which powers my laptop) live happily without it. Various shims exist, logind exists to allow running things like Xfce without systemd.
Is that true? The gentoo documentation says that you can chose your init system independently of your desktop manager, and puts openrc+gnome as an example:
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/GNOME/GNOME_Without_systemd/Gen...
You can also install GNOME on OpenBSD, which of course does not run systemd.
> After the transition from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3, configuring GDM is only possible through systemd as it no longer supports other init systems.
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...