At first I could not understand why removing a dns discovery program would require removing gtk3 but when I found out that avahi was developed by Lennart Poettering it became much clearer.

Everything must depend on everything else so that all the components of the monolith are present.

Amen, hear-hear, etc... not to imply that i know Lennart Poettering, or have seen all that he's done, or read *any* of his code, but the bit about everything relying on everything else resonates loudly.

Once a system reaches a certain level of complexity, any imperfections in its design are magnified, often to the point where it's just a big mess.  Everything is hooked into everything else.  Take a look at how many libraries get loaded when you fresh-boot linux/devuan.  Or when you run any app for that matter.  To see what i'm talking about, in real life as opposed to some bullshit thought-experiment, proceed as follows:

1. Install ascii, or any other version of linux (since it's an across-the-board performance failure imo), on the oldest, slowest POS system you can lay your hands on, and pick one with a slow-spinning Winchester disk.  Once you have it installed, measure and record (a) fresh-boot time, (b) time to start Firefox (or the slowest big-app you normally use, gimp maybe, something you start often enough to notice differences).

2. Now take out the Winchester disk.  Copy it to an SSD.  Repeat the measurements.  The only thing that has changed is the speed of fetches, therefore the change in measurements is linear with respect to the number of fetches.  Figure it out.  There are way too many libraries. 

You could run similar performance tests using an app that's statically linked, as opposed to one that uses some high-level library.  The results will be the same, maybe more dramatic.  I have an old Acer laptop with a 32-bit Intel, i think it's an N270 but offhand i don't recall.  And i have code that runs as fast on it as it will run on an i7 simply because it doesn't load as many libraries, or in the case of apps like PHP which use includes, the number of includes is analogous to the number of machine-code libraries so it's leveraged, includes *times* hardcode libraries.

Now, once you've tumbled to the *massive* level of interdependencies within linux, regardless of distro, maybe you'll consider just what it would take to fix everything that Lennart Poettering's changes have affected, from what little i understand of git (yeah, i know, i'll git around to learning it Real Soon Now), it should be possible to find out just which modules need to be backed out; pretend it's a trojan intentionally planted by some genius who turns out to have been an idiot, or a hacker from the Evil Empire, or whatever.  The point is to see just how much damage can be done, and where it's been done, whether accidentally and with good intent, or otherwise.

Perhaps i've gone on a ramble here, this blueberry diesel is quite good.  Sometimes a system gets so balled up that the only way to fix it is to replace it on a mass level, ie rewrite the whole thing from scratch.  And when you have a humongous tightly-interdependent system, like a linux distro, the how-to of that can be a trick.

I was manually changing the rc scripts in the /etc/rcX.d directories.
Than I discovered update-rc.d. Much easier, much faster and everything is in plain text. I don't think I could go back after discovering how simple it is to manage start up.

As for run levels I watched some talks referring to run levels -3. Now your init may have control everything below 0. but everything above that.
UEFI and BIOS.. ext. Have access to the hardware .
It's important to get an early start to get into OS. I noticed this when I was using windows. I had a program called Spy Shelter Firewall. If it doesn't start early all the stuff you don't want running will run if it starts before your program. But managing start programs with task manager is a joke. Not sure why they removed sysconfig but that is off topic . So lack of Init freedom feels very Windoz to say the least.

but the OP's problem with GTK3  ahavi was maybe a Gnome Desktop Environment thing.

for example the Trinity Desktop Environment has something called Ahavi-TQt in its packages set.

not really knowing what ahavi was I went and looked it up, the impression i got was it was Potterings answer to windows home/ workgroup thing but for linux.

given most of you seemed to have uninstalled it, I was wondering if there were any specific apps/ programs that relied on it.

maybe it was meant as a dirty hack to get around ldap and samba or something?

I remember a few years ago i had trouble with those 2 (at least pretty sure it was ldap) items trying to get a linux system and windows system talking to each other and the printer, i know i ended up giving up on it.

If it was meant for what i said above maybe I could rename it and call it "whats local" PMSL.

golinux wrote:
@siva . . . You'd think a quick search would be the first thing to do.  But is sooo much easier to let someone else do it.

If you go back, you'd see that I did say I'd research it when I have the time. You know, I have a full time job, and a wife and kid that takes quite a bit of my time. I don't live on the computer. I really don't know what I said to warrant such passive aggression. And who was whining? That crack was unwarranted.

All I'm saying is, who controls the rc scripts, controls the universe.  Openbsd has the right idea there imo

golinux wrote:
@siva . . . You'd think a quick search would be the first thing to do.  But is sooo much easier to let someone else do it.

If you go back, you'd see that I did say I'd research it when I have the time. You know, I have a full time job, and a wife and kid that takes quite a bit of my time. I don't live on the computer. I really don't know what I said to warrant such passive aggression. And who was whining? That crack was unwarranted.

It's a pretty simple manager.  To be fair, I wish I just better understood rc scripts and took the time to manage them better.

That's how I feel with systemd.... Init scripts just make so much more sense personally.

Back to the original topic: the plot thickens...

# apt-get remove --purge avahi-daemon
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  libavahi-core7 libdaemon0 libre2-3
Use 'apt autoremove' to remove them.
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  avahi-daemon* libnss-mdns*
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 2 to remove and 59 not upgraded.
After this operation, 386 kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

I wonder what GTK3 the OP was referring to.

In any case, it did give me an excuse to just uninstall it ^_^