On Saturday 14 July 2018 16:28:18 Nick Koretsky wrote:
> On Sat, 14 Jul 2018 15:03:46 -0700
>
> William Morder <doctor_contendo@...> wrote:
> > 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.
>
> This depend on what level you want to purge systemd. If it is not for
> ideological reasons and you are ok with having all sysytemd libraries in
> system, just want sysvinit as pid 1, then you just need to install
> sysvinit-core and uninstall systemd-sysv.

Thanks, I believe that answers my question. I've already seen Devuan running 
more or less like this, and it seemed to do okay. I am not "against" systemd 
for ideological reasons; I only want my system to run smoothly and 
efficiently, not to hang up, that kind of thing; and something like this 
would seem to be my solution, at least temporarily. 

As for getting off-topic, I will drop it for now, as I have got my own answer, 
and leave others to work out these other issues that don't concern me. 

Bill