Since upower deprecated support for pm-utils, what other choices are or will there be to use hibernate and suspend on kde without pm-utils?

systemd - but this has nothing to do with KDE.

If gentoo uses a upower version that requires systemd (but doesn't use the latter), the upower installation is pretty useless.

Upower is (was?) already considered an abstraction layer, but if it really turns into a pure systemd wrapper, it might be reasonable to add systemd and pm-utils (and better /sys/power/state writing...) as direct solid backends.

The alternative would be to fork upower *iff* they're really turning systemd into a hard dep (and gentoo not buying into that)

Gentoo already provides an alternative for non-systemd systems, that works with pm-utils:

Code: Select all

sys-power/upower-pm-utils

It's a package pulled from upstream's 0.9 git branch (the last before the switch to systemd).
Just unmerge upower and emerge upower-pm-utils.