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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 But now, two years later, with Debian 9 on the horizon, Devuan 1 feels outdated.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.]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 17 2017, @08:30PM (3 children)
1.0 is Jessie Stable. Which some people will want as a migration path away from Debian (Which is what Devuan 1.0 was always intended to be: An in-place replacement for Debian that would eliminate systemd as a prerequisite.) Having been running Ceres for almost a year now, I can tell you that all the packages available in it are up to date (give or take a kernel version.) My only problem so far is that not all packages have dpkg-reconfigure available, and last time I had an issue, there were still systemd configuration files getting installed with some packages even though I didn't use them (not every linux package available still has sysvinit scripts either! So that is another factor that has slowed down devuan development.)
That said, I haven't had any problems in a good 6 months, and as far as stability has gone, the only issues I *HAVE* had were all directly related to ext4 and a shoddy seagate drive that fails under thermal load and corrupts either the disk journal, or master inode tables, leading to hundreds of thousands of lost files after an fsck as a result of the directory tables getting corrupted. (Same problem happened with Ubuntu and debian previously on that particular drive. Keeping it cool ensures no problems, but summer months tend to be less favorable to it.)
(Score: 5, Funny) by linuxrocks123 on Saturday June 17 2017, @10:34PM (2 children)
Have you considered getting a new hard drive?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday June 18 2017, @12:21AM (1 child)
"What's a hard drive?"
- Post-Millennial
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 19 2017, @10:16PM
It's when you have to commute into a large city every day for work at rush hour. Sometimes switching to a different city's hard drive can have a profound impact on your life.