On Sat, 14 Jul 2018 19:50:38 -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. 
> 

BTW, a trick to prevent systemd accidentally getting reinstalled as pid 1 on
updates - create a file in /etc/apt/preferences.d with following content:

Package: systemd-sysv
Pin: release o=Debian
Pin-Priority: -1



-- 
  Nick Koretsky (nick.koretsky@...)