I don't want this to become a my distribution is better flamewar so please read the whole question and only answer if you know a distribution that fulfils all requirements.The situation is the following: We have servers running Proxmox and a lot of OpenVZ VMs on them.The used kernel is old and has problems with systemd. We currently run mostly Debian Wheezy, except for some software only supporting Ubuntu.Debian jessie just got released, as you probably know and has systemd as standard.I tried upgrading a VM without installing systemd and it worked OK, but then the problems so many feared started. The first was php5-fpm : Depends: libsystemd0As stated, there is a reason I can't use systemd (apart from my dislike for it) and I am not really fond of the thought to start compiling and distributing parts of the core infrastructure we use. (And PHP is a important part because we host websites for customers) Is there any stable distribution left one can use for servers that should run safely without non security based updates?Something like CentOS or Debian stable without systemd?Or is there no other way than switching the whole hosting setup to something that supports systemd?
Stable server distribution without systemd (for OpenVZ)?
debian;centos;systemd;distribution choice
You can run Debian Jessie without running systemd. On upgrades, just make sure sysvinit-core remains installed (see the release notes for details; they specifically address LXC concerns which are similar to yours on OpenVZ). On new installs, see https://wiki.debian.org/systemd#Installing_without_systemd for instructions.libsystemd0 provides systemd support on systems using systemd. It can be installed without requiring systemd to be actually used... As long as the systemd and systemd-sysv packages are not installed then you're not using systemd.