Lately I have been experimenting with a Debian sid ppc64 system without systemd. Systemd is the default nowadays in Debian. In the old days all ‘services’ or ‘daemons’ were managed by init scripts. I was able to install sysvinit and to dump systemd from a base Debian install. I then installed a desktop (LXDE). It took me a while to get the network to work in LXDE but I know now how that is done. If people are interested I can make a page dedicated to achieving this in a verbose manner. The advantage of a systemdless system is a much faster boot, especially on these old devices we use.
Does it work in Mintppc 32 bit also?
I think it will as I don’t see any reason why it would only work in ppc64. Please note that it probably won’t work from a working MintPPC installation. Such a drastic, fundamental change can only be introduced from a very small base system with as little amount of packages present. This can thus only be accomplished by manually building this system. With good instructions anyone could do it, it is not that difficult. It only requires some extra work.