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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 But now, two years later, with Debian 9 on the horizon, Devuan 1 feels outdated.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, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Saturday June 17 2017, @10:44PM (17 children)

    by fustakrakich (6150) on Saturday June 17 2017, @10:44PM (#527179) Journal

    Just switch to Slackware. There's even a most bodacious live version [slackbook.org] to put on a USB stick. In fact, I'm using it right now. Works flawlessly.

    --
    La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 17 2017, @10:53PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 17 2017, @10:53PM (#527183)

    Patty boy, get this going. Perhaps work together with them Devuan boys.

  • (Score: 2, Disagree) by Gaaark on Saturday June 17 2017, @11:06PM (2 children)

    by Gaaark (41) on Saturday June 17 2017, @11:06PM (#527192) Journal

    Don't. Have. The. Time!
    :(

    Tried slack a couple times, and just too much work and time, unfortunately.

    Tried Linux from scratch, too. Was fun working with and in it, but that was the days of timey-wimey. No timey-wimey for me!, now.
    Maybe when I retire.

    --
    --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
    • (Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Sunday June 18 2017, @01:03AM (1 child)

      by fustakrakich (6150) on Sunday June 18 2017, @01:03AM (#527238) Journal

      Tried slack a couple times, and just too much work and time, unfortunately.

      :-) You don't have to install it from source, you know.

      --
      La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
      • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday June 18 2017, @10:11AM

        by Gaaark (41) on Sunday June 18 2017, @10:11AM (#527415) Journal

        :) yup, it is a lot of work, though, once installed (installation, if I remember correctly, was actually easy on slack): using the different package managers, if there was one for your Program... If not, hunt down dependencies, then the dependencies dependencies and....

        Manjaro's easy, lol.

        --
        --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 18 2017, @02:38AM (12 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Sunday June 18 2017, @02:38AM (#527288)

    I "subscribed" to the Slackware CD sets back in the 1990s - lack of reliable internet connectivity (via dialup) in Slackware was responsible for a 12 year delay in my uptake of Linux. It just wasn't worth the time and effort (to me) back then. Since about 2004, the tables have turned and most of my systems now run Linux (probably 60 30 10 Linux / Windows / OS-X).

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 18 2017, @04:37AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 18 2017, @04:37AM (#527330)

      back in the 1990s - lack of reliable internet connectivity (via dialup) in Slackware was responsible for a 12 year delay in my uptake of Linux

      No local college or tech company where a Linux Users Group could have meetings once a month?
      No Installfests?

      -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

      • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 18 2017, @12:58PM

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Sunday June 18 2017, @12:58PM (#527439)

        See, I had a job, and a life, and I did actually spend about 16 hours (two full working days, spread over about two weeks) following up on available resources to try to get the Slackware to connect more than one time (it would connect, and stay connected, one time - after a reboot, it never would connect again. Reinstall from scratch and it would work one more time.) And, there was this alternative called Windows, which, warts and all, actually did work.

        After two full days of searching, I figured: A) there is a solution out there somewhere, and B) I don't care because it's much easier to get stuff working in Windows.

        --
        🌻🌻 [google.com]
    • (Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday June 18 2017, @06:30AM (1 child)

      by frojack (1554) on Sunday June 18 2017, @06:30AM (#527375) Journal

      lack of reliable internet connectivity (via dialup) in Slackware was responsible for a 12 year delay

      Really? It was internet access that held you back?

      For us it was applications. We could always get any distro mailed for $2.50 from walnut creek, and use it on every computer in the office. No worries about internet downloading.

      But the first diskette that wandered in from the windows world brought everything to a screeching halt.

      --
      No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
      • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 18 2017, @01:25PM

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Sunday June 18 2017, @01:25PM (#527445)

        From 1990-1998 I was doing Windows app development. Idealistically, I might have rather been writing for Macs or something (I actually chose Atari 800, later ST for my personal machines), but the people we were selling our software to for $5K per copy used PCs. End of debate. I thought we might use Linux for embedded stuff, and we actually did "port" a FAT file system implementation out of Linux into an 8bit micro to write files on a removable hard drive, pretty bleeding edge stuff in 1997; but at the desktop level, Slackware was just lacking. 99-2003 I was still developing some in Windows, but strangely doing more Autocad work, name one big app that just wasn't available in Linux around 2000? Usually Autocad was top of that list. Then in 2003, my day job switched to "pure" EE work, actually more admin procedures and paper pushing, but EE was the title. When the 64 bit AMD home machines came out around 2005, I got one and built it up with Gentoo, the only 64 bit home OS at the time, did some hobby projects that used more than 4GB of RAM at a time, and I've always had Linux systems since then. IIRC I also had a cygwin project running from about 2004-2006, and it was impressively reliable and fast too.

        In that 2004-5 timeframe, I began using Gimp instead of Photoshop, and OpenOffice was more reliable than my corporate install of MS Word for a few "fringe" things like embedding multiple images in a document - go figure. These were the multi-platform apps, running in Windows, but no impediment to using Linux to host them either. Then in 2006, I went to work for a fruit house - principal of the company was a Jobs acolyte Mac fanboi ad nauseum. While "architecting" for him, I chose Qt to develop his apps for Mac - as a hedge to hop to Windows if necessary. He hated the idea that we weren't locked in to using Macs, and hated me even more when the investors told him "you can have our millions, but you have to partner with these guys over here, and they use PCs."

        I've stayed "cross platform" ever since, whatever I do in software I really try to keep hardware and OS agnostic - port it around, test it on as many platforms as possible. Generally, the bugs you find when porting aren't the fault of the platform that showed you the bug, they're usually bad programming practice that, when corrected, make the apps more reliable on all platforms.

        --
        🌻🌻 [google.com]
    • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday June 18 2017, @10:15AM (1 child)

      by Gaaark (41) on Sunday June 18 2017, @10:15AM (#527416) Journal

      That was my problem as well until i discovered man pages and wget -c.

      Life saver.

      --
      --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 18 2017, @01:06PM

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Sunday June 18 2017, @01:06PM (#527440)

        My favorite man page was for sound: "If you really _must_ hear biff bark..." that f'ing attitude persisted in the Linux sound world until at least 2007. Crappy, fragmented, uneven support. Get sound working in one app and you've broken it for another. FWIW, I've deemed it reliable enough today to architect it into a product development project that has reliable sound as a critical feature, 2+ years and 20+ developers, depending on modern Linux to deliver a rock-solid reliable audio stream. Now, this is still a hedge: we control the hardware, we control the entire OS configuration and application development. It's still not an endorsement of Linux desktop sound as having "arrived in the modern age," but it is my solution of choice for this project.

        The man pages were there in 1997, and I followed the information provided meticulously, and it did nothing to fix dialup connectivity ability past reboot. I was using Mozilla in Windows to search for solutions on how to get reliable Mozilla operation in Linux - which really was the corker after a while.

        --
        🌻🌻 [google.com]
    • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday June 18 2017, @10:17AM (5 children)

      by Gaaark (41) on Sunday June 18 2017, @10:17AM (#527417) Journal

      Addendum: and redhat 5.2 from retail store to use wget from to download other distros.

      --
      --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
      • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 18 2017, @01:30PM (4 children)

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Sunday June 18 2017, @01:30PM (#527447)

        Spending money on Free software, missing the point entirely.

        --
        🌻🌻 [google.com]
        • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday June 18 2017, @01:36PM (3 children)

          by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday June 18 2017, @01:36PM (#527450) Journal

          It seems you who misses the point. Hint: The "Free" in "Free Software" doesn't refer to the price.

          --
          The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
          • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 18 2017, @02:23PM (2 children)

            by JoeMerchant (3937) on Sunday June 18 2017, @02:23PM (#527464)

            Never did, but... paying others to help you maintain that which your organization should be learning to maintain for itself... that's the point I think is being missed.

            --
            🌻🌻 [google.com]
            • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday June 18 2017, @04:20PM (1 child)

              by Gaaark (41) on Sunday June 18 2017, @04:20PM (#527510) Journal

              This was for me at home: found linux on the internet from windows, but had trouble getting a connection long enough to download it.
              Bought redhat 5.2 ($9.99 Canadian) and was from there able to (once i learned man pages and adding -c to wget) distro hop and a whole new world opened up.

              Went from learning how to get the Xf86 config file to the point i could get a gui running, to distro hopping to linux from scratch fun, to mandrake and corel linux and ubuntu........

              So much fun and learning (feeding the brain) for $9.99... i'll pay that price again no problem.

              Now, my distro hopping is free: if i had a ton of money like Mark Shuttleworth, i'd probably pour it into Arch/Manjaro, make it THE linux to install and port games to and Bob would then be your uncle.

              What did Scotty say: if horses had wheels, my grandma would be a cart or something?

              --
              --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
              • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 18 2017, @04:45PM

                by JoeMerchant (3937) on Sunday June 18 2017, @04:45PM (#527519)

                That's cheaper than I normally associate with RedHat - I think I paid more for the Slackware subscription... yeah, this is not paying for software, this is like paying for connectivity bandwidth.

                If I had 50 lives to live, all starting in the late 1960s, I'd definitely want to devote a few of them to development of free software, mostly Linux, in the late 1990s. Time to ask the Architect for another reboot.

                --
                🌻🌻 [google.com]