On Fri, 07 Aug 2015 22:21:53 Mark Trickett <marktrickett@gmail.com> said,

Thank you for this response. It contains most of what I will need when I do an install of Jessie. One query, what window managers have you tried without systemd, and what you find particularly good or bad. For myself, I find the older desktop metaphor more effective and productive.

I am running testing, it was "upgraded" to systemd without my knowledge sometime back. Systemd was removed and replaced with sysv with a procedure. identical to what Rick has writen. Note, at the time I did not know that "better" init systems exist. I will have to give some of them a look. Anyway from what I have read I think you will find most windowmanagers other than Gnome will be OK. I run FVWM, the standard config is ___VERY___ basic but there are much better configs around. With FVWM there is almost nothing you cannot do with it, as long as one has time to work through the (text based) config files, not for the faint of heart, but one can get it to do exactly what one wants. Using Linux since mid 1993, Lindsay