I run Debian on my workstation and laptops but still prefer to use CentOS/RHEL on my servers.

The automatic startup of newly installed services (before you even have the opportunity to configure them) on Debian (and derivatives) has always bothered me and is a (small) factor in my decision.

Fortunately, there are a few "workarounds" to prevent newly installed services from being automatically started!

First, there's the brute-force / heavy-handed approach -- override the systemd presets [0] to set all services to disabled by default:

  $ cat /etc/systemd/system-preset/00-disable-all-services.preset
  disable *

Alternatively, as a one-time thing, you can "mask" the service before installing the package but this requires you to manually create the symlink (instead of using "systemctl mask") -- and requires you to know the name of the service unit beforehand:

  $ ln -s /dev/null /etc/systemd/system/nginx.service
  $ apt install nginx
  # ... configure nginx as desired ...
  $ systemctl enable nginx
  $ systemctl start nginx

Finally, there's the old, "sloppy" (IMO) method of "hacking" the /usr/sbin/policy-rc.d script to immediately exit with a status code of 101 ("action forbidden") [1].

(I'd recommend avoiding the latter entirely and going with whichever of the first two options better suits your needs.)

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EDIT: Just remembered another method but I'm not sure if it still works:

  $ RUNLEVEL=1 apt install nginx

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[0]: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.pre...

[1]: https://people.debian.org/~hmh/invokerc.d-policyrc.d-specifi...