by Bulkley » 2019-11-19 00:26
golinux, thanks for the links. I particularly appreciate the posts from dasein. I'm really not qualified to comment directly but I want to add an amateur's impression.
To me, Debian has always been about package management. With relative ease users can install packages and their dependencies automatically follow. My system has an Openbox platform but has components from Lxde, Xfce, Gnome and probably others. That's the Debian magic; we can to a great degree cherry pick software. I understand that Systemd requires special packaging that creates an all or nothing situation. The developers over at Devuan are doing an heroic job reversing Systemd's hooks. (Or something like that. As I said, I'm an amateur observer. ) The thing is, there should never have been a need for Devuan; Systemd should be written such that users can continue to cherry pick those components they want, even Systemd components and/or dependencies.
The Debian package management allows for, encourages, creative development. Yes, it is important that Debian has room for alternate inits without restriction to limited systems. Converting to an alternate init should be as easy as apt-get install . . . .