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 pr

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...