Since you’re interested in not breaking things, you should be running Debian Stable.

Debian makes several kinds of package changes available:

If your Debian system is suddenly very slow to login – like, 25 to 90 seconds of apparent inactivity on every new ssh – it’s not DNS.

Check to see if your elogind or systemd/logind is actually running. Look for a log entry in auth.log along the lines of

dbus-daemon[4501]: [system] Failed to activate service 'org.freedesktop.login1'

right after an SSH attempt.

If so, restart the daemon.

-30-

One of my kids wanted a new computer badly enough to pay for most of it, and I have been wanting to upgrade the main house server for a year or so. Parts for both arrived this week.

Let’s quote a Debian Developer, who I will not name:

“Oh, and by the way, systemd bloody works on my system. I can’t even remember when I switched to it. It Just Worked.”

The problem with systemd is that he’s got one system, not five hundred, and he somehow thinks that makes it a representative sample.

I don’t have any such confidence.

Let’s say you install a new Debian system using the Jessie release, which will become the next stable release in a few months. And let’s say that you would prefer not to be enmeshed in systemd.

Too bad.

However, you can remove it.