Thanks largely to posts on the debian-init-diversity mailing list,
I have a VM running with buster and XFCE4 without systemd.
The process is not great, but it is doable:
I started with a fresh stretch VM (since I wanted to test upgrading
into buster.)
1. Change /etc/apt/sources.list entries to point to buster
2. apt update && apt dist-upgrade
3. shutdown -r now
The system is now buster and systemd.
You might want to dump a list of packages now:
dpkg --get-selections > packagelist
4. apt install -d sysvinit-core elogind
5. shutdown -r now
reboot, but pause the bootloader to make your init=/bin/sh
6. apt install sysvinit-core elogind
Ideally, at this point nothing except systemd would be uninstalled. In
practice, currently, an awful lot of things that you might actually want
get uninstalled.
7. echo needs_root_rights=yes >> /etc/X11/Xwrapper.config
8. shutdown -r now
9. re-install packages that you wanted. Good thing you have that
list, right?
At some point in the future I will try this on a laptop, and if
successful, on my main desktop.
-dsr-
