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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 But now, two years later, with Debian 9 on the horizon, Devuan 1 feels outdated.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) by frojack on Sunday June 18 2017, @06:30AM (1 child)
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
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.
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