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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 But now, two years later, with Debian 9 on the horizon, Devuan 1 feels outdated.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.]


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  • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday June 17 2017, @10:35PM (2 children)

    by Gaaark (41) on Saturday June 17 2017, @10:35PM (#527175) Journal

    Sure: easy install and all my programs and devices worked perfectly!?!?

    Didn't think so, soooo.....

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    --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by srobert on Sunday June 18 2017, @02:08PM (1 child)

    by srobert (4803) on Sunday June 18 2017, @02:08PM (#527457)
    • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday June 18 2017, @04:13PM

      by Gaaark (41) on Sunday June 18 2017, @04:13PM (#527507) Journal

      "the next update break everything: not only the grub has now only 2 entries for this only one OS, but neither of them is working ! (blank screen) Booting back via usb, i'm really missing the vmlinuz.old that almost every OS was keeping aside when installing a new kernel :( Anyway, thanks for the good work! (And for me, I'll see how I can escape breaking my system a second time...)"

      maybe once it becomes more established and bugs worked out, maybe i'll give it a try, or if the arch/manjaro team gives both a systemd and non-systemd upgrade format.... right now, i don't really have time to work on major problems like above. (i know, i might have a perfect install/upgrade experience, but i might not... )

      I REALLY wish that Ubuntu had become THE linux of bigness and 'do no harm', that game makers could make their games for and then people like the arch team could make it work for arch, etc.
      Instead, it started becoming almost MS Ubuntu (Apple Ubuntu maybe?).
      That way, people could just install Ubuntu for a (usually) flawless install and start playing games, therefore telling game makers "Hey, just port the game over to Ubuntu and the rest will follow".
      Now, we got the systemd mess, Ubuntu going bad wolf........ look at me, an old man rambling.....

      --
      --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---