On Sunday 15 July 2018 01:34:01 Nick Koretsky wrote:
> 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

Thanks to those recent tips from deloptes and Nick Koretsky, my system is now 
purring like a kitten. 

And I did find a file called avoid-systemd in that folder, so I copied it for 
backup. 

Bill