First, I think Knoppix is to a relatively high degree debianized already, what I miss, is a knxbootstrap utility as a debootstrap alternative. I don't like the design of initrd.img, and after having done some stress testing of systemd in 8.3.0 Jessie, reconfiguring the system a bit, I consider it not very robust. So I support Klaus K's design decisions. The important thing for me, is that the wish list of live/persistence features in Debian that I presented here last year, has largely been fulfilled in the present version of live-boot. So I can work with directories instead of partitions for the different versions of Debian, and having the compressed image one one partition and the persistent versions on another, makes development quite easy. Also, squashfs is a Linux kernel insider, cloop is definitely not. For example, I had to download source and compile the kernel module cloop.ko and manually insert in order to handle the Knoppix images in Debian Jessie. Both use aufs, though - even if OverlayFS is the kernel supported way to do union file systems now.