Anyone who installs Jessie from scratch will find that they are not offered no choice in the matter. This means that only the technically well-equipped will be able to make a switch in the event that systemd does not work as promised. Existing users of the testing stream will find, on checking, that their systems have been migrated over to systemd. Systems running the stable version of Debian have not been migrated across yet.

Debian project leader Lucas Nussbaum told iTWire: "The Debian Installer has already been modified to install systemd by default, and there are ongoing discussions on how to provide the best user experience during upgrades from wheezy."

Back in February, after much discussion and debate that often turned into shouting matches, the Technical Committee decided, via a casting vote from its head Bdale Garbee, that it would use systemd as the default init system for Jessie, the next release which is due to be released in November.

The committee left open the possibility that it would change its mind, were there to be a general resolution that mandated otherwise.

To quote the resolution, "Should the project pass a General Resolution before the release of 'jessie' asserting a 'position statement about issues of the day' on init systems, that position replaces the outcome of this vote and is adopted by the Technical Committee as its own decision."

During the debate that led up to this decision, there was talk of supporting alternative init systems as well, so that Debian users would have a choice of which one to use. The debate canvassed upstart, SysV, and openRC. SysV is the existing init system.

But a further resolution on July 31 makes it abundantly clear that there will be nothing official about alternative init systems. This came about following the removal of support for upstart in a package.

The maintainer of tftp-ha had noted "Removing upstart hacks, they are ugly and upstart is dead now."

A long discussion ensued and following that the Technical Committee issued the following resolution: "The issue of init system support recently came to the Technical
Committee's attention again. For the record, the TC expects maintainers to continue to support the multiple available init systems in Debian.  That includes merging reasonable contributions, and not reverting existing support without a compelling reason."

It is notable that there is no language stating that it is mandatory to continue to support multiple init systems in Jessie. The committee only "expects" maintainers to continue to support other init systems. There is no compulsion, no hard-and-fast rule.

While systemd has been taken up by many distributions, including the big names Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu, and SUSE, there are many issues around it which continue to agitate members of the open source community.

In fact, so severe is the dissatisfaction, that one developer, associated with a site known as boycott systemd, has started a fork of systemd called uselessd, that will strip away a lot of the functions of systemd. Things like journald, libudev, udevd, and superfluous unit types are stripped out.

Uselessd also allows for porting to the BSDs. Systemd is a Linux-only init system and the developers have ensured that it will be very, very difficult to port to any of the BSDs.