As I’m customizing the Kali image for my pen bot I once again came across the hell that is systemd, what would have been rc.local is now of course a steaming pile of systemd stuff. The same goes for the default run level since init is now a thing of the past, this Stack Exchange answer was helpful. You can no longer just set the initdefault level in /etc/inittab.
Debian as-shipped boots towards the graphical target. You can see this yourself:
$ ls -l /etc/systemd/system/default.target...No such file or directory$ ls -l /lib/systemd/system/default.target... /lib/systemd/system/default.target -> graphical.target
So to boot towards the multiuser target all you need do is to put in own target:
$ cd /etc/systemd/system/$ sudo ln -s /lib/systemd/system/multi-user.target default.target
It is highly recommended not to mess with the manual symlink-ing, but rather use appropriate options of the
systemctl command. In this case, to set the default target you should run:# systemctl set-default multi-user.target
