> I would vote for basing off of Devuan. With Debian and Ubuntu you are
locked into too many of RedHat's walled garden technologies going forward.
I think Debian is a better choice than Devuan for an upstream distro, at
least these days. Starting with Bullseye (and with Buster if you backport
Bullseye's version of elogind) it is not very hard to base a systemd-free
distro on Debian.
I have looked through Devuan's VCS, and most of their modifications don't
actually improve SysVinit compatibility, but rather are Stalinesque removals
of any reference to systemd ever existing. Doing this isn't harmful, but
it's a waste of time that could be and have been spent improving SysVinit
compatibility and keeping up with Debian releases. Contrast with AntiX, who
unlike Devuan does not spend time removing references to systemd, but has
never depended on libsystemd0 and does a much better job keeping up with
Debian releases. Trisquel already has trouble keeping up with Ubuntu
releases. Imagine if after a Debian release, Trisquel users had to wait for
Devuan to release their downstream version, and *then* wait for Trisquel to
release theirs.
Also, because Devuan does not (and does not have the resources to) maintain
SysVinit support themselves, if Debian were ever to drop SysVinit support it
would almost certainly mean the end of Devuan, so using Devuan as a base does
not actually make you less dependent on Debian's decisions in the long run.
If you are just a user who just wants a systemd-free Debian system working
out of the box, Devuan is a fine choice, but as the base for a distro I think
Debian is a better option. On most of my machines I currently run my own
customized version of Debian, following AntiX's approach for SysVinit
compatibility.
Ubuntu on the other hand, is indeed a poor choice if you want to avoid using
systemd. Whereas Debian simply does not prioritize SysVinit support, Ubuntu
makes conscious decisions to make use of systemd's features in some of their
own software.
