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 But now, two years later, with Debian 9 on the horizon, Devuan 1 feels outdated.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