I've not had any problems with swapping out systemd-* with other packages, including -coredump, -cron, -oomd, -resolved or -timesyncd. Even journald was fairly painless to swap out. Unlike systemd itself, the distros' approach them not so much as a core part of the userland, but as lightweight basic implementations that meet many user's needs, but which are in no way a replacement for more fully-functional implementations.

it’s not possible to swap out journald.

I ended up in gentoo mostly just to avoid systemd

(used it before, mostly to learn. went to debian for new laptop. gave up after fighting systemd. I'm aware of devuan and artix, but gentoo just worked (after all the time spent))

Debian, at least until bookworm works perfectly without systemd. The easiest way to make this transition, is to installed Debian with nothing but 'standard system utilities' and 'SSH server' (if you want) during install:

https://forum.qubes-os.org/uploads/db3820/original/2X/c/c774...

Once install is done, login and save this file:

  /etc/apt/preferences.d/systemd

  # this is the only systemd package that is required, so we up its priority first...
  Package: libsystemd0
  Pin: release bookworm
  Pin-Priority: 700
  /etc/apt/preferences.d/systemd

  # exclude the rest
  Package: systemd
  Pin: release *
  Pin-Priority: -1

  Package: *systemd*
  Pin: release *
  Pin-Priority: -1

  Package: systemd:i386
  Pin: release *
  Pin-Priority: -1

  Package: systemd:amd64
  Pin: release *
  Pin-Priority: -1

After:

  apt-get install sysvinit sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils

Reboot then:

  apt-get purge systemd

There are a few edge cases, packages which require systemd, but I've been running thousands of systems including desktops this way for a decade.

Yes, I also run thousands of systems with systemd too.

Have you looked at Devuan? Genuinely a good experience.

It's important to remember that it has to be this aggressive in excluding systemd, too. There is quite a lot of strong coupling amongst the parts of systemd, so there are very few half-measure scenarios, where one can have only some systemd stuff, that will actually function correctly in toto.

Moreover, there are the odd one or two unrelated packages that just happen to have the string "systemd" in their names. (-:

Note that this will still allow systemd-udevd because it's packaged under its original name, udev.

yeah. you need eudev instead. still, I appreciate the guide!

MX Linux for the win. Debian based, but defaults to 'init'. Booting with systemd is an option. Just enough systemd-* running to make things easy and seamless.

  $ ps agxf|grep 'systemd'
      607 ?        S      0:00 /lib/systemd/systemd-udevd
     2201 ?        S      0:00 /sbin/cgmanager --daemon -m name=systemd
     2726 ?        S      0:00 /lib/systemd/systemd-logind
 

Also can install Nvidia or AMD video drivers.

I’ve been dropping systemd-timesyncd and using chrome since forever, and it works well. I’m sure some systemd-* things are harder to replace, but not every replacement is a fight against your distro.