Without going into a huge rant about the plague which is systemd, there is a fork of Debian Jessie without it, known as Devuan.

This provides a more current upgrade path for those who wish to avoid systemd, but don’t want to be stuck with Wheezy, which at best comes with a 3.2 based kernel (thanks to wheezy-backports).

Personally, I really dig Void, but for compatibility (and manageability), my service-facing system are generally running a BSD, or Debian.