Am Sonntag, 15. Juli 2018 schrieb William Morder:
> From these details, I assume that you are running Devuan.

Nothing to assume here, I revealed that in my original post. ;-)

> I was just about 
> to write something about similar problems that I have had over the past
> week or ten days. When I run apt-get dist-upgrade (running Devuan), it
> installs slim and xfce (neither of which I want), as well as libreoffice
> packages (which I also don't want, as I prefer OpenOffice). 	When I tried to
> get rid of these items and reinstall only OpenOffice and tdm-trinity as my
> default dm, I ended up with a system that booted, then halted at a login
> prompt; I tried to login, but neither user nor root logins worked, and I
> couldn't boot into failsafe or anything else that worked.

This probably depends on what state your system was in before upgrading, that 
is, which packages were installed and if they were installed manually or by 
which dependency etc., which is unclear by the information you provide, so 
either it's a Devuan-related issue or based on what you have done. It has 
nothing to do with the problem I reported.

> On the whole, Devuan runs much faster than Debian, and also my system
> doesn't hang. I started having these and other problems, and returned for
> the moment to Debian Jessie, which runs okay, but hangs a lot, and when I
> try to reboot seems to get permanently stuck on some stuff called rpcbind
> and watchdog. (Also I note that systemd is always doing something, don't
> know what.)
>
> I am contemplating some kind of FrankenDebian hack (or rather,
> FrankenDevuan). I seem to recall that somebody mentioned that sysvinit
> could be installed, and systemd purged, on a Debian system. The do upgrades
> from the Debian repositories, but keep sysvinit and avoid the systemd
> problems.
>
> Any ideas, guys?

Outline your problem(s) precisely and start a new thread or maybe post to devuan 
list.

Kind regards,
Stefan