The self-proclaimed "Veteran Unix Admins" forking Debian in the name of init freedom have released Beta 2 of their "Devuan" Linux distribution.
Devuan came about after some users felt it had become too desktop-friendly. The change the greybeards objected to most was the decision to replace sysvinit init with systemd, a move felt to betray core Unix principles of user choice and keeping bloat to a bare minimum.
Supporters of init freedom also dispute assertions that systemd is in all ways superior to sysvinit init, arguing that Debian ignored viable alternatives like sinit, openrc, runit, s6 and shepherd. All are therefore included in Devuan.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Aiwendil on Sunday December 04 2016, @09:14AM
It is - just requires that you blacklist systemd (or append "systemd-" to any and all upgrade, install, remove et.c operations) and that will case apt to find alternate solutions.
(Do anyone know if there is a way to make sure apt enforces a certain package is alwsys installed?)
Of course it probably will land you in depenncy hell (in part due to some solutions will prevent systemd-shim [helper to reduce the systemd-mess on systemd-free systems] from being installed, and in part due to some packages requiring systemd without offering alternatives [knowing how to alter and rebuild deb-packages is very helpful])
Heck, the official debian way to run a systemd-free debian [debian.org] is to just install a conflicting init (which will cause apt to kick out systemd and all that depends on it with no other requirement-ruote)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by fritsd on Sunday December 04 2016, @03:13PM
I'm a long-term Debian user.
When I upgraded from Debian Wheezy to Debian Jessie, it installed systemd.
Without asking, without even a mention in debconf, that I can recall.
Then my system was fucked up.
Then it took me more than a week to try to extricate all the packages that depended on packages that depended on packages that suddenly depended on systemd, but never did before.
You are right: it landed me in dependency hell.
Maybe it's me, but I found that it was really *extremely difficult* to remove systemd; even with 20 years experience with Unix, Linux, Debian, even as an amateur dpkg package builder, it was extremely difficult.
Then I became a Devuan volunteer and shared my experiences modifying packages to remove the dependencies! So it all ended OK ;-)
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Sunday December 04 2016, @10:46PM
Ahh, I avoided systemd by doing a crapload of apt-get install systemd- foo bar baz (and apt-get --dry-run dist-upgrade to get a list of what was needed) until I got a clean enough apt-get upgrade
(I'm in the habit of doing it that way since I've gotten my system hosed by bad libc [static linked dpkg and lynx are in my toolbox], conflicting perl-packages [always intersting to upgrade perl-base] and gotten gnome accidently installed once (took a while to get my system back to "login at console" after that one) over the years - so I distrust anything I havn't check by checking the output of apt-get --dry-run $command first)