When Debian v8 (ascii) was in the process of being designed, a decision by the leadership caused the init system to change to Systemd. Many long time users of Debian disagreed with that decision (including me), and Devuan was forked.

Devuan (https://www.devuan.org/) was designed to preserve the older SysV Init, and actually added the choice of other init systems for anyone using it. It was decided to not support Systemd since that was being handled very well by the Debian project.

Devuan takes changes to Debian and removes dependencies on SystemD, allowing the end user to determine which of the other init systems they would like to use.

I strongly disagree with the SystemD project, as I remain in the belief that multiple packages working together provide a stronger, more robust solution than Systemd's monolithic design. It is closer to Microsoft Windows than Unix, with the instability associated with that operating system.

As such, Daily Data will continue to use Devuan for the forseeable future on all but the most critical projects, where we use FreeBSD (https://www.freebsd.org/)