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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 But now, two years later, with Debian 9 on the horizon, Devuan 1 feels outdated.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 Gaaark on Sunday June 18 2017, @10:15AM (1 child)
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
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]