dep composed on 2018-06-28 14:16 (UTC-0400):
the issue is the presence of frigging gnome, i believe. how can i be rid of this contagion and all its friends and relatives?
I install including
tasks=standard base-installer/install-recommends=false
on installation kernel cmdline, and get none of Gnome or GTK until installing Firefox or something else that depends on GTK3.