At least long enough to decide which Linux distro to use in the future.
Unfortunately many distros have already jumped on the systemd wagon but I think soon there will be a increasing collection of non-systemd alternatives which will continue to follow the KISS principle which made Unix and Linux so great. There already _are_ alternatives to systemd and systemv -- launchd and upstart (used by ChromeOS) for instance.
I hope soon we will have an init system which takes the best of all current ones while still following the KISS principle. Linux must keep this principle alive unless it will probably fall into the trap of Windows' monolithic bug hell. Ironically Linux 3.11 kernel was already called "Linux for Workgroups" :-)
I just installed void on my laptop (x230) and it's quite nice. Very minimal and uses runit for managing services. Not many packages but it's had everything I've needed so far.
It also uses libressl and the packages build against alternative libcs so that's pretty cool. It's also interesting in that it's a new distro rather than a fork.
> many distros have already jumped on the systemd wagon
Odd. If systemd is so Objectively Terrible (the general tenor of these posts: systemd is bad, it's obviously bad, with no redeeming features whatsoever), why is that happening? There can't possibly be a financial incentive.
"Objectively terrible" certainly isn't the case with systemd, but there's plenty of reasons for adopting software in general that has nothing to do with technical merit. Much of the Linux desktop daemons (particularly ones associated with GNOME and Freedesktop.org) have begun using systemd's interfaces, sometimes as hard dependencies. Thus, for the major distributions that want to tailor to the most popular use cases, the cost of adopting systemd is probably lower than patching against the ever-expanding upstream that requires it.
Lots of programmers aren't particularly good at analyzing the cost of surface convenience in proportion to future technical debt. Software is just as frequently adopted purely because it's convenient, well marketed or in a self-serving feedback cycle, because it's already popular.
It's also worth noting that ChromeOS still uses Upstart.
The primary reason why systemd got adoption it that it solved real problems both for end users (system administrators) and for higher layers of the stack.
It has replaced various kinds of NIH'ed and pointlessly differently colored bikesheds in different distros with stable public interfaces that obviate #ifdef hell in higher layers of the stack.
Your technical debt argument is very apt. It's how we ended up with piles of brittle and unmaintainable shell scripts that don't do error handling worth a damn.
As long people have the option which init system (and software in general) to choose everything works fine. However it is not ok to force people to use something they question, or actually don't want. By the way, systemd is not the only way to go. There are also runit and other systems.
I always follow the KISS principle because the more complicated a system gets the more difficult it is to be fixed. I am a Linuxer since 1990, and I am concerned that current Linux distros follow a way which will make maintainability much more difficult by leaving the KISS principle.
There's no set schedule, but the previous release generally continues to receive security updates for about a year after the release of a new version. See https://wiki.debian.org/DebianOldStable.
(This assumes that Debian doesn't decide to declare Wheezy as a new LTS release once support for Squeeze ends in February 2016... AFAIK it's not clear what their plans are there.)
