Quoting Mark Trickett (marktrickett@gmail.com):
The fact it does binary logs is a _very_ _major_ defect in my opinion and experience.
For completeness, I'll note that it's pretty easy to disable the handoff of logging information to systemd-journald and substitute a handoff to rsyslog or syslog-ng, instead. So, for example, the Debian package for systemd defaults to rsyslog as system logger. (Your point is of course well taken about the wrongheadedness of systemd-journald binary logfiles, which tells you all you need to know about the wisdom of entrusting system architecture to these particular coders.)
I noted that it is possible to put openrc on Debian 8. I shall need to do a bit of research. Some notes from you and/or Rick Moen would be very appreciated.
apt-get install openrc Reboot. apt-get remove --purge --auto-remove systemd Note that said command will remove these Debian packages if they are present: o 5 GNOME packages that directly on systemd: gnome-bluetooth, gnome-settings-daemon, gdm3, gnome-core, gnome-disk-utility. (This is essentially the GNOME requirement for systemd-logind for 'seat' login credentials, which has become problematic to satisfy without systemd because the Freedesktop.org coders orphaned ConsoleKit, and ConsoleKit2 isn't yet usable last I heard.) o 10 debian-installer* packages that depend directly on systemd because the Debian 8.0 default installer provides systemd o 1 WindowMaker dock applet for shutting down a machine by clicking a button (wmshutdown). o 5 packages that depend on systemd because they're systemd-related: (live-config-systemd, libpam-systemd, systemd-dbg, systemd-sysv, libpam-systemd). o 1 GNOME-affiliated display manager that requires either libpam-system or consolekit (lightdm). o 6 assorted other packages that require that systemd _or_ something else be present (mate-power-manager, solaar, libguestfs0, sogo, ligthttpd, lxsession). Details omitted here but you can look them up in package metadata. o 2 packages from the core Freedesktop.org stack -- the guys responsible for most of the furious code churn in GNOME -- that depend on libpam-systemd (policykit-1, udisks2). o 1 wireless/Bluetooth network manager from GNOME that depends on libpam-systemd (network-manager). o pcmanfm, daisy-player, and a couple of other obscure apps that require policykit-1 that in turn requires systemd One depending on policykit-1 that is not at all obscure, is a rather infuriating and pointless dependency hairball, and merits rebuilding the package if you need it (hplip). Measures to keep systemd from being installed in the future: echo -e 'Package: systemd\nPin: origin ""\nPin-Priority: -1' > /etc/apt/preferences.d/systemd echo -e '\n\nPackage: *systemd*\nPin: origin ""\nPin-Priority: -1' >> /etc/apt/preferences.d/systemd If your system uses multiarch (32 and 64bit packages), do this too, to pin the 64bit version of systemd: echo -e '\nPackage: systemd:amd64\nPin: origin ""\nPin-Priority: -1' >> /etc/apt/preferences.d/systemd In other multiarch cases where amd64 is the default architecture, you may have to pin the i386 package: echo -e '\nPackage: systemd:i386\nPin: origin ""\nPin-Priority: -1' >> /etc/apt/preferences.d/systemd Above is from my notes of changeover conducted on a virtual machine, so I'm reasonably confident they're complete and correct. Getting rid of udev/libudev1 and getting any replacement (eudev, mdev, vdev) to work with the latest xserver-xorg packages is an experiment I've not yet undertaken. A few things such as bsdutils and util-linux have started to depend on libsystemd0, but that seems harmless.