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posted by cmn32480 on Saturday June 17 2017, @07:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the interesting,-but... dept.

Jesse Smith reports via DistroWatch

Conclusions

On the whole, the Devuan project appears to have achieved its goals. The distribution offers users an operating system virtually identical to Debian 8, but with systemd replaced with SysV init. The project provides existing Debian users a clean and easy migration path to Devuan that has only a minimal amount of side effects. Taken on its own, Devuan is a lightweight operating system with a fairly minimal (and responsive) desktop environment.

While Devuan has reached its goals, I had two significant concerns about the distribution. The first concern was the system installer. While it worked, I'm curious as to why Devuan appears to have discarded the reliable Debian installer in favour of a less feature rich and less polished installation process. Other Debian-friendly installers, such as the one which ships with Linux Mint Debian Edition, are available if a more streamlined approach is wanted.

My other concern is that Devuan 1.0.0 is about two years behind Debian. A fork of Debian without systemd seemed promising and interesting in 2015 when Debian 8 was released. But now, two years later, with Debian 9 on the horizon, Devuan 1 feels outdated. The software, such as the office suite and kernel, are about three years old at this point and unlikely to appeal to any except the most conservative users. The distribution may hold more appeal on servers where change often happens more slowly, but even there some of the Devuan packages are starting to show their age.

At this point I suspect Devuan 1 will only appeal to the more enthusiastic members of the anti-systemd crowd. If Devuan 2 can be launched shortly after Debian 9 comes out later this year then I could see the project gaining a stronger user base, but at the moment Devuan feels like an interesting idea that took too long to get off the ground.

Previous: Devuan Stable Release -- at Last!

[Editors Note: Debian 9 has been released. We ran a story on it a few hours ago.]


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by KiloByte on Saturday June 17 2017, @08:23PM (14 children)

    by KiloByte (375) on Saturday June 17 2017, @08:23PM (#527132)

    [Editors Note: Debian 9 has been released. We ran a story on it a few hours ago.

    Nope, it's not yet there. A few hours from now, at the soonest. Come help test the images before the release.

    --
    Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 3, Touché) by kaszz on Saturday June 17 2017, @09:35PM (13 children)

    by kaszz (4211) on Saturday June 17 2017, @09:35PM (#527151) Journal

    Why do that when there's systemd free version?

    • (Score: 2) by KiloByte on Saturday June 17 2017, @09:40PM (2 children)

      by KiloByte (375) on Saturday June 17 2017, @09:40PM (#527154)

      Devuan is jessie, which is ancient. Debian will release stretch tonight.

      --
      Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
      • (Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday June 18 2017, @06:16AM (1 child)

        by frojack (1554) on Sunday June 18 2017, @06:16AM (#527370) Journal

        Slap a new kernel in it and its new again.

        --
        No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 19 2017, @11:22AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 19 2017, @11:22AM (#527851)

          One wish that was true. But since the move to DRI/DRM for the GUI side of things, the kernel can't be too new or Mesa or Xorg will barf because the interfaces don't line up.

          Makes a guy miss the old way, warts and all, because at least then one had a fighting chance...

    • (Score: 1, Disagree) by r1348 on Saturday June 17 2017, @10:33PM (6 children)

      by r1348 (5988) on Saturday June 17 2017, @10:33PM (#527173)

      Because that appeals only to a tiny fraction of userbase, while up to date software is much more appealing?

      • (Score: 4, Disagree) by kaszz on Sunday June 18 2017, @05:50AM (5 children)

        by kaszz (4211) on Sunday June 18 2017, @05:50AM (#527364) Journal

        Being up to date with something heading for the cliff is usually a bad investment.

        • (Score: 2, Disagree) by r1348 on Sunday June 18 2017, @07:07PM (4 children)

          by r1348 (5988) on Sunday June 18 2017, @07:07PM (#527556)

          I've been hearing about the systemd apocalypse since it was first announced and guess what? None of it happened. Nothing, nada.
          Anyway, we live in a free world which means you're free to develop and use a systemd-free distro. The fact that you're then stuck with 3+ years old software just testifies on what little demand there is for it.

          • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday June 19 2017, @04:12AM (3 children)

            by kaszz (4211) on Monday June 19 2017, @04:12AM (#527721) Journal

            There were similar comments when Windows were "solid and established" who would want a hobbyist hack like Linux or BSD.

            • (Score: 2) by r1348 on Monday June 19 2017, @06:14PM (2 children)

              by r1348 (5988) on Monday June 19 2017, @06:14PM (#528069)

              Except that Devuan doesn't represent any innovation of sorts over the status quo. It's Debian with freakin' SysV! It's just a niche product for a niche of conservatives. Again, it's a free world, use whatever fits you, but don't turn it into a cult. A distro which main characteristic is what it doesn't offer has no appeal to me.

              • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday June 20 2017, @02:38AM

                by kaszz (4211) on Tuesday June 20 2017, @02:38AM (#528297) Journal

                You are correct, but it's also a product that got rid of a potential liability that will be an obstacle further down the road. And that system'd is suspected of being driven by nefarious objectives makes the decision even better.

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 22 2017, @03:36PM

                by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 22 2017, @03:36PM (#529532)

                And unix outdate Windows by what, decades?

                Thing was that Linux was free as in beer, ran on commodity hardware, free of lawsuit problems, and then came the dot-coms and the LAMP stack.

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 18 2017, @02:35AM (2 children)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Sunday June 18 2017, @02:35AM (#527286)

      I have a feeling that the same groups that want "systemd free" also aren't too unhappy to stay back with Debian 8 for a long time to come.

      If it ain't broke...

      Me, personally, I fall into both camps depending on the application. For simple stuff where I just want a fast booting system, systemd Ubuntu/Debian fits the bill. For complex messes full of old packages... many times the systemd free approach is easier to develop and support. I try to stay away from the latter, but there are times when it's the right thing to do.

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 18 2017, @04:28AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 18 2017, @04:28AM (#527328)

        FTFA:

        I ran a few comparisons of boot times, memory consumption and disk resource usage when running Debian 8 verses running Devuan 1. [...] The boot times of both systems were identical, to within a second. In short, boot times, disk usage and memory footprints were near enough to being the same as to make no practical difference.

        So much for the major "improvement" claimed for systemd.

        -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Sunday June 18 2017, @05:18AM

          by kaszz (4211) on Sunday June 18 2017, @05:18AM (#527346) Journal

          One might suspect that systemd is there to increase RedHat sales of "services" and to wreck the open source ecosystem so they can be addicted to three letter malcode like the rest of the population.