Thanks for the guide. Serious question, say I were to do a clean install of Jessie. I would use Xfce with either LightDM or no DM, or I might choose to set up a VPS that obviously won't even need Xorg. Is there a way during installation that I can skip installing systemd at all in that case, perhaps through a minimal install and then following up with adding the software I want? I don't like the idea of trying to purge systemd and its dependencies after a fresh install.
I am not sure about Jessie, but whenever Debian switches to Systemd as the default, I would guess even the minimal install would have it. Systemd is the init process, so you can't really just do without it (or some other init system at least). I think it will probably require somebody remixing the installer image to use a different init system.
Not sure though, I'm not super informed about what Debian is planning for the switch.
I think (no experience, but it makes sense) that Gentoo lets you pick the init system easily at install, you might want to look at that.
You might want to try it though. In my experience, the minimal config for systemd is quite lightweight and clean. I don't use KDE or Gnome, but I quite like systemd on my Arch workstation. Arch (and Fedora) have had it for quite a while now, even back when it was probably a bad idea to switch...
The netinstall (not sure about the others) lets you choose exactly what packages you want during the installation, including init system, as far as I know.
Debian, then at the "task selection" stage choose nothing (definitely not desktop environment), later install xmonad and trayer and all that. Or you want xfce, OK install that. Oh and probably lightdm or xdm or some login manager, assuming you don't want to log in text and then startx or whatever other strategy.
Its not like Debian "requires" gnome or kde or whatever as part of the install. Just install what you want.
It just Recommends:libpam-systemd, its not a strict dependency. If I try to do an 'apt-get remove systemd systemd-shim' it doesn't show that it would remove XFCE.
I'm on KDE now though so I haven't checked how well xfce works without systemd.
KDE itself works quite well with systemd-shim.
