Right, then I have to relearn my userspace setup... well maybe it's time - but I've been on debian longer long before I met my childs mother, before I even grew a single hair on my chest, before I had a bank account, a job, or a cell phone. But perhaps you are right, it's time to quit it

MX Linux (Debian-based, uses sysvinit with systemd shims) and Devuan would seem to be obvious alternatives that wouldn't require changes to your setup.

I'll check it out. I have all sorts of weirdness with this system. snap is great because debian doesn't package a lot, yet then all my snap programs are sandboxed in a non useful way. (like mysqlworkbench won't save passwords in a keystore because that hookup doesn't work - and it cant run without a working keystore. like firefox will start once, but if you run the firefox command, it'll error out that firefox is already) lots of annoying little things

Debian runs without systemd fine, at least for me.

Try trinity as a desktop with sysvinit.

I am a big fan of trinity! I have it for the unbeatable KDE 3 konqueror and a few other choice apps.

Yes, a well run / nice project. KDE3 seems far better than anything in the KDE or Gnome world since.

(I don't use kwin, but instead a different window manager, and only part of trinity for this and that, but that's not due to a lack of quality, I just prefer to mix and match.)