Debian Jessie - without systemd

Update: It looks like with Jessie now "frozen" that for the time being your freedom not to install systemd is fairly safe... In addition you can seemingly get rid of most of pol/console kit cruft too. While the so called lightdm and slim are ruled out by this, at least xdm is still lightweight... Debian has caved into systemd and if it was "just" a sysv replacement I'd be just all: Meh - get on with it... There are *lots* of reasons why systemd is broken by design which I won't bother reiterating (see here) by far the worse is lack of choice (choice being my main motivation for using Linux!) - before long you won't be able to use anything else... The poor way systemd developers are reacting to bug reports and criticism is like a nightmare redux of pulse audio (remind me what problems I never had is that bloatware actually solving) Could there be a connection? Maybe this sabotaging Microsoft employee knows. I wondered if it were still possible to run a Debian (specifically Jessie) system without systemd - I'm glad to say for the moment at least its possible! I uninstalled as much as I could (after installing sysv first!) I had to reboot to finally uninstall systemd but ended up leaving libsystemd installed as Blender (and a bunch of other stuff) seems to have a dependency on it. Its a pernicious dependency chain (especially dbus - no alternative for that either), which is what systemd is using to gain its domineering position. I did end up loosing some gnome junk which I'm really not sorry to loose. There is no discernible difference to my 6 second or so boot time, so I guess systemd is another piece of junk solving a problem just for the sake of it, that really isn't an actual problem. One minor irritation is that you loose policykit (really is it impossible to provide policykit functionality without systemd) these means no pkexec, really no great loss but it is used by the .desktop files for gparted and synaptic. The simple hack is just to use gksudo in the desktop files - these will get overwritten by updates probably but then I have launchers on my Desktop. I really, really can live without policykit! So hopefully this will hold me until I've learnt how to set up FreeBSD Gentoo how I like it...