Roger Lynn wrote: 
> Hi,
> 
> I have three Stretch AMD64 systems with sysvinit - a desktop and laptop
> running KDE and a headless server. Is there any information available
> anywhere to tell me what will happen when I attempt to upgrade them to
> Buster? The release notes don't mention it and other sources I can find just
> talk about switching from systemd to sysvinit, which doesn't look easy with
> a desktop environment.

If you want to keep sysvinit, here's the order of events:

change sources from stretch to buster

apt update

apt dist-upgrade

apt install sysvinit-core 

on a desktop system, apt install elogind

reboot

check that /sbin/init is a 42KB-ish binary, not a link off to
systemd land.

Test things carefully.

I've got this working on a few test servers and one test
"desktop" VM. I haven't tested KDE yet, just XFCE4, but I can
probably try KDE this week.

> The KDE systems have systemd-shim installed, which is not present in Buster.
> Is this going to cause problems? Will the server be okay? Should I just stay
> with Stretch until Bullseye is released or consider moving to Devuan after
> more than 20 years with Debian?

It's plausible that if KDE doesn't currently work,
buster-backports will eventually allow it to work -- if so, it
will be due to the Debian Init Diversity team.

-dsr-

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