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posted by janrinok on Wednesday October 26 2016, @01:15AM   Printer-friendly
from the more-devuan-than-devuan dept.

DistroWatch reports

Geeks determined to resist the systemd juggernaut have several options. For me, the most interesting project is Devuan, a fork of Debian. [...] However, it does have a few flaws

[...] It was my search for a quick and easy way to get Devuan up and running that led me to Refracta, a unique distro that fills a niche that has long been neglected. Refracta's existence predates the systemd wars--it was originally based on Debian 5.0, otherwise known as "Lenny". But when Debian 8.0 "Jessie" went full systemd, Refracta moved to the Devuan camp.

Refracta's chief selling point is this: it's a live image that can be quickly installed, customized, and re-installed again. So basically you can roll your own live CD, configured for your hardware and tweaked to suit your personal tastes. It is currently my favorite distro, and I'd recommend it to any Linux geek who has had a little bit of experience. A total Linux newbie might feel more comfortable with a distro that mimics Windows' point-and-click friendliness, but once you've got the basics down, Refracta is easy to get used to.

It's also worth mentioning that even without being installed, a Refracta live CD or USB stick makes an excellent diagnostic and rescue tool. It contains quite a few command line utilities that aren't in a default Devuan or Debian installation, including gddrescue, testdisk, smartmontools, hdparm, lm-sensors, iftop, and iptraf.

[...] Unlike Devuan which uses PulseAudio, Refracta employs ALSA.

[...] Starting with version 8.0, Refracta has gone whole-hog at banishing systemd, not to mention PulseAudio. [...] One could say that Refracta is actually more Devuan than Devuan.


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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by Appalbarry on Wednesday October 26 2016, @01:55AM

    by Appalbarry (66) on Wednesday October 26 2016, @01:55AM (#418811) Journal

    Seriously, you have to check out this image, [distrowatch.com] labelled

    Refracta on a USB stick
    (full image size: 625kB, resolution: 1024x768 pixels)

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @09:28AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @09:28AM (#418904)

      *wanks*

      31

  • (Score: 4, Touché) by frojack on Wednesday October 26 2016, @02:26AM

    by frojack (1554) on Wednesday October 26 2016, @02:26AM (#418818) Journal

    A total Linux newbie might feel more comfortable with a distro that mimics Windows' point-and-click friendliness,

    Are we confusing Desktop Environments with Linux here? No mention is made that the default DE is XFCE4

    Unlike Devuan which uses PulseAudio, Refracta employs ALSA

    Those are not alternatives. Its rare for any linux system NOT to run both.

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @03:42AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @03:42AM (#418836)

      Yeah, pretty rare indeed. Pulseaudio is a mixer that uses ALSA (the kernel driver portion, anyway). Can't have pulseaudio without ALSA but ALSA works just fine without pulseaudio. ALSA doesn't clobber your CPU usage like pulseaudio nor does it suffer outrageous latency like pulseaudio.

    • (Score: 1) by Veyrdite on Wednesday October 26 2016, @04:12AM

      by Veyrdite (6386) on Wednesday October 26 2016, @04:12AM (#418846)

      Two statements here:

      1) Those are not alternatives

      Technically correct, but misleading. Pulseaudio requires ALSA as a backend, so they're not alternatives to each other. But from a user's perspective they can be.

      Some applications only support pulseaudio and some only support ALSA. Others support both or combinations of them along with other audio backends.

      2) It's rare for any linux system NOT to run both.

      Incorrect, however I suspect you mean "desktop Linux distros".

      Android devices: few run pulseaudio
      Popular desktop distributions: most run pulseaudio
      Server setups: few run pulseaudio

      Regardless of whether or not you like pulseaudio, it's wise to provide support for multiple audio backends in your applications. This allows your software to more easily be ported to other platforms and allows users to use a different backend if a bug is introduced in one that breaks your application. The vast majority of the time these problems do not crop up and the use of backend is transparent to the user, but when something does go wrong it all starts to matter.

      Alas, it does take time to add support to multiple backends. I've read ALSA's interface can be a pain, so it might be worth using a library that supports multiple backends. I'm writing from a user's perspective, I've never used an audio lib.

      Supporting multiple backends also helps make sure that your code can still work in ten years time from now. If one backend is difficult to get running or no longer exists, then other options can be used instead. Whether or not people care about this thing is hit and miss: some devs don't care, others do. Up to you.

      • (Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday October 26 2016, @05:12AM

        by frojack (1554) on Wednesday October 26 2016, @05:12AM (#418868) Journal

        Pulse does not require Alsa, it merely requires A back end. Just about any would do.

        Also does not require pulse. It has its own facilities for stream managment, multiplexing, etc.

        Pulse is just the last in a long line of glue layers of that shambles we call the Linux sound architecture.

        --
        No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
        • (Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday October 26 2016, @05:13AM

          by frojack (1554) on Wednesday October 26 2016, @05:13AM (#418869) Journal

          Also does not require pulse

          Meant to say Alsa does not require pulse.

          --
          No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @02:07PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @02:07PM (#418978)

          A glue layer introduced by a serial-NIHer named Poettering.

          The only thing PA has going for it is that it has a central volume control for each program that hooked into it. But then i wonder how many actually makes use of that even over at Windows where the idea apparently came from.

          • (Score: 2) by Marand on Thursday October 27 2016, @05:52AM

            by Marand (1081) on Thursday October 27 2016, @05:52AM (#419300) Journal

            The only thing PA has going for it is that it has a central volume control for each program that hooked into it. But then i wonder how many actually makes use of that even over at Windows where the idea apparently came from.

            It also has the flat-volumes "feature" that can damage your hearing and/or audio equipment. (ref. #1 [fedoraproject.org], ref. #2 [reddit.com])

            I made the mistake of installing PA recently for a program that didn't have ALSA support and got bitten by this. Upstream default is flat-volumes=yes, so Debian used the same. Initially just annoyed me a bit because I didn't like the weird way it interacted with the now-useless "master" volume, up until another application hijacked the volume and set it to 100%. I use headphones and typically consider the volume to be comfortable at ~15% so that was not fun. I don't think it caused any hearing or hardware damage -- though it may have and it's just minor -- but it could have.

            Terrible fucking decision that can actually cause physical harm. Good job, PA devs.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 06 2016, @06:10PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 06 2016, @06:10PM (#423199)

              Makes one love the alsa default of zero master and mute whenever an audio device is initialized.

              • (Score: 2) by Marand on Sunday November 06 2016, @09:34PM

                by Marand (1081) on Sunday November 06 2016, @09:34PM (#423272) Journal

                Not quite the same thing, but yes. People have complained about ALSA's mute default for years but it is the sane, safe choice.

                Flat volumes is a mistake by design, but allowing new apps to set volume to 100% on launch is a special kind of stupid. Usually Lennart's software's poor design is only annoying, rather than literally dangerous to one's health.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @09:24AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @09:24AM (#418902)

      A distro without pulseaudio is probably a good thing if you want/need to use JACK.

      • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @11:25AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @11:25AM (#418929)

        Yeah, well you don't know JACK.

  • (Score: 2, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @02:44AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @02:44AM (#418823)

    It's the Linux nobody wants to talk about... and it makes all these problems go away. Along with quite a few others.

    I think Gentoo has the Amiga's marketing team. They like to talk about performance - the extra, like, 1% you get by building everything specifically for your own system. But what you really get is pieces that *always* fit together seamlessly. You never have to fight with it. You just flip a switch and go get coffee. When you come back, it's ready.

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by frojack on Wednesday October 26 2016, @03:07AM

      by frojack (1554) on Wednesday October 26 2016, @03:07AM (#418827) Journal

      It's the Linux nobody wants to talk about... and it makes all these problems go away. Along with quite a few others.
      I think Gentoo has the Amiga's marketing team. They like to talk about performance - the extra, like, 1% you get by building everything specifically for your own system. But what you really get is pieces that *always* fit together seamlessly. You never have to fight with it. You just flip a switch and go get coffee. When you come back, it's ready.

      Bull.

      If you come back after a cup of coffee tomorrow morning it might be ready.
      But it will no better "fit" together than it would have using any other linux distro. Packages not designed to work together don't suddenly get that capability just because you compile half of them, and the other half come out of the repositories.

      --
      No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday October 26 2016, @03:48AM

        by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Wednesday October 26 2016, @03:48AM (#418840) Journal

        If you know what you're doing, the parent poster is actually correct. It just demands a lot of patience and, honestly, a slightly autistic level of attention to detail. Gentoo is more of a framework for a distro than a distro proper. It was my first and I'll always love it, though until I get something better than this old T500 it's Arch and *BSD for me.

        --
        I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @11:27AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @11:27AM (#418930)

          Everything's easy if you know what you're doing.

          • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday October 26 2016, @07:01PM

            by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 26 2016, @07:01PM (#419094) Journal

            Not true. Ever dig a ditch? Some things are a lot of work even when you know what you're doing. And just saying "with a computer" doesn't change false to true.

            That said, things are a lot *easier* if you know what you're doing. I can generally compile code that I want. But this doesn't mean that I can always get disparate pieces to work together. If you paid attention to the GP(?) he said (approx)"it just takes an autistic level of attention". That's not "easy if you know what you're doing", that's "fun if you enjoy that kind of thing". (Sometimes I do, but usually I'd rather be doing something else.)

            --
            Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @07:48AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @07:48AM (#418891)

        > If you come back after a cup of coffee tomorrow morning it might be ready.

        I've been using Gentoo for more than ten years.

        Compilation times are the least of your problems. With a modern computer you can get your whole system recompiled in 24 hours (and without monstrosities like Chromium and LibreOffice, a few hours). But it's going to take you quite some time to get things just right; the time investment is mostly human. Nowadays I can get any new computer running like I want it to in said 24 hours because my configuration is already done and automated.

    • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday October 26 2016, @03:46AM

      by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Wednesday October 26 2016, @03:46AM (#418837) Journal

      This is NOT offtopic. Gentoo is still my favorite distro, and the very first one I started on almost 13 years ago...yes, that is rather like learning to swim by slathering yourself in KC Barbecue sauce and leaping into a piranha tank, but that's how I do things. It's too painful on my old hardware now, but there's something wonderful about it. It's a discipline, almost like a kind of logic-puzzle version of a martial art.

      That said, FreeBSD is really nice too for many of the same reasons, but it has actual packages :)

      --
      I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by t-3 on Wednesday October 26 2016, @03:47AM

      by t-3 (4907) on Wednesday October 26 2016, @03:47AM (#418838)

      Agreed. Gentoo is always dismissed as "too hard" or "compiling takes too long", which I guess are legitimate complaints... but portage is hands down the better than any of the other systems our there. To get a clean, minimal install and have only the packages you want, with only the dependencies you want, nothing linux-world beats it, except maybe arch, but idk as I could never get arch's installers to boot on my machines (new intel macs and old ppc macs).

      • (Score: 2) by fnj on Wednesday October 26 2016, @05:22AM

        by fnj (1654) on Wednesday October 26 2016, @05:22AM (#418871)

        "Arch's installer", hah hah, LOL.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by twistedcubic on Wednesday October 26 2016, @04:57AM

      by twistedcubic (929) on Wednesday October 26 2016, @04:57AM (#418865)

      I used Gentoo exclusively from 2002-2007, on the desktop and on my linode server. After the umpteenth emerge world resulted in broken printing (I teach, so this is a mission critical app for me), I tested Debian Etch on the server, then on the desktop, and never looked back. I've been using Debian stable ever since (Etch, Lenny, Squeeze, Wheezy, Jessie) and printing NEVER EVER breaks. The chances of me ever swicting back to Gentoo, or any other distro, is zero squared. Getting stuff done without ever having to fight your computer is nirvana.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @06:05AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @06:05AM (#418878)

        If you are happy with Debian then by all means stick with it! However, Gentoo - like Linux in general - has come a *long* way since 2007. The rough edges are a lot less rough. Just rough enough to grab onto and twist the way you like them, but not so rough that you cut yourself just trying to do basic things.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @11:47AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @11:47AM (#418933)

          I went to Gentoo around 2004 or so, despite the annoying inflated exuberance of the user community, because I liked the idea behind it, and its supposed simplicity in upgrading, and because I didn't feel I had time to spend on a Linux From Scratch. I did an install on a server and it seemed to work ok. However, when I did a system upgrade as per the official instructions, my system wouldn't even boot. Dependency hell would have been ok because I had been through those wars with Red Hat, but the kernel wouldn't even load.

          After spending several hours on that trying to get it to boot, which included dealing with the self-congratulatory "friendly" funroll_loops community (whenever it got to the point where the easy and obvious things were tried and didn't work, it always evolved into "Don't blame Gentoo for you being an idiot, because only an idiot could screw it up") I threw in the towel and installed CentOS. That went very smooth, and yum almost never let me down.

          • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday October 26 2016, @07:10PM

            by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 26 2016, @07:10PM (#419101) Journal

            Back when I was using Red Hat, I like them. When they ditched the professional edition without warning I switched to Debian, and I usually like that. I'm not real thrilled with systemd, but finally the rough edges seem to be smoothing out...I hope. At least I can currently boot from images on two different partitions, and that was broken for quite a long time, and I started searching for a better distribution...but they finally seem to have fixed it again. It still requires surgery before each install to change the UUIDs in ftab of the system I intend to keep so that they instead mount to file system identifiers, or the boot will be broken after the install, however. YUCK.

            I know why they made the change, but they don't seem to realize just how broken a solution they have adopted.

            --
            Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
      • (Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Wednesday October 26 2016, @02:50PM

        by linuxrocks123 (2557) on Wednesday October 26 2016, @02:50PM (#419009) Journal

        > After the umpteenth emerge world resulted in broken printing (I teach, so this is a mission critical app for me), I tested Debian Etch on the server, then on the desktop, and never looked back.

        For real, man? I teach, too. I use Slackware-Current, which is technically the alpha for Slackware's releases but is routinely used instead as a rolling release distribution. Printing occasionally breaks, as do other things. It would break less if I only updated the software on my computer once ever two years and only ran software at least four years out of date like you do, but that would be a rather extreme solution. Here's my solution instead. It contains three steps:

        1. Test whether is printing is still working after I update CUPS and fix it if it isn't.
        2. In case I forget to do step 1, don't wait until the last minute to print out exams and stuff, which is a good idea anyway.
        3. In case I forget to do step 2, print from another computer or the printer itself.

        > The chances of me ever swicting back to Gentoo, or any other distro, is zero squared. Getting stuff done without ever having to fight your computer is nirvana.

        Happy you found something that works for you. You sort-of went from one extreme (rolling releases) to the other (already obsolescent biennial releases), but ok then.

        On another note, printing breaks more often than other, more complex functions of the computer. I think CUPS just sucks.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @09:05AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @09:05AM (#418899)

      ... unless it does not. In my experience Gentoo never works when you set more than 5 or so USE flags or go for one of the more esoteric profiles.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Unixnut on Wednesday October 26 2016, @09:27AM

      by Unixnut (5779) on Wednesday October 26 2016, @09:27AM (#418903)

      Gentoo was one of my first distros, I have been running it for more than 10 years, however I find little reason to use it nowadays as a desktop OS.

      Back in the early 2000s when my machine was a hand me down AMD K6-II, it made perfect sense to compile from source. Yes it took an age (i usually started a kernel compile in the afternoon, then did something else till tomorrow morning), but the system as a whole had better performance and was more responsive, and as I spent more time using it than updating it, it worked for me.

      However in the last few years Gentoo went downhill. Portage in particular has become a PITA. I cannot tell you how many times I have ended up in portage dependency hell, when a package depends on two others, both of which (for example) require a different version of Perl (and you can't install both versions).

      With new multi-core multi gigabyte desktops I don't even care about the compile times, but the amount of my life I have to waste masking, unmasking, uninstalling, pinning versions, reinstalling and setting custom per package USE flags just to get an existing machine to update is not worth it.

      For a clean install, no problems, but updating a machine after a couple of months is worse than pulling teeth. That is why my last Gentoo install (my Desktop) has been converted to Devuan. I need an OS to work on, not to forever tinker with. It distracts me from more important stuff.

      Yes, binary distros pull in everything and the kitchen sink, but the smallest hard disk you can buy nowadays is 750GB, far more than any OS will ever need. Not to mention the silly amounts of RAM. You get no noticeable performance benefit in day to day use, but a lot of headache with Gentoo.

      I still use Gentoo, primarily as a framework for building "appliances". It is amazing for that, and for embedded systems. I have built high performance units for HFT trading, and Gentoo beats the pants over every other OS for its latency tuning.
      It made a pretty good server OS as well (until I moved to FreeBSD) but it just is no longer workable for desktops,

      Every OS has its niche, Gentoo fills its niche perfectly. Just because the mainstream desktop people don't know or use it, doesn't mean it is forgotten.

    • (Score: 2) by tibman on Wednesday October 26 2016, @02:08PM

      by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 26 2016, @02:08PM (#418980)

      I still use Gentoo. It starts in a minimal state and you can grow it from there. Most people who like other distros probably don't spend the first three days removing all the crap that comes pre-installed. My one big complaint about Gentoo is when one package blocks another it's not always obvious what you have to do to clear that up. System maintenance could really use a more user-friendly makeover. Unfortunately, Gentoo has some intentional hurdles to keep people out.

      --
      SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Geotti on Wednesday October 26 2016, @04:41AM

    by Geotti (1146) on Wednesday October 26 2016, @04:41AM (#418862) Journal

    It was my search for a quick and easy way to get Devuan up and running [...]

    Even if slightly off-topic, I don't understand the original issue, but just in case someone wants to get to Devuan from Debian on e.g. digitalocean:

    install Debian, replace your sources with the testing or stable repositories [1], install the dev1 keyring and update sources [2] and finally dist-upgrade and remove remains [3]. There's an alternative crossgrade guide here [friendsofdevuan.org] and more installation guides (e.g. for raspi) here [friendsofdevuan.org].

    Oh, and I just saw that they even have an installation image [devuan.org] now.
     

    [1] From dev1fanboy's upgrade doc [devuan.org]

    deb http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/merged jessie main
    deb http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/merged jessie-updates main
    deb http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/merged jessie-security main

     

    [2]

    apt-get update && apt-get install devuan-keyring -y && apt-get update -y

     

    [3]

    apt-get dist-upgrade
    apt-get autoremove --purge && apt-get autoclean

    Will keep Refracta in mind, if I want a systemd-free livecd, though.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @03:46PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @03:46PM (#419027)

      A worthy +5 post - thank you! Gonna try Devuan on my RasPi next time I have the chance!
      -- FatPhil

  • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @09:17AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @09:17AM (#418901)

    Sad times when Devuan is your best option. Is Devuan technically even a distribution without any release ever? It has almost been two years and they are still stuck with one beta release. They have a couple of admins that keep their web site barely running, one packager and no developer support whatsoever.

    So far the best thing that came out of devuan is https://mobile.twitter.com/ShitDevuanSays [twitter.com] and with the basically non-existing resources, the toxicity of their community and the total lack of any positive vision that is not going to change.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @10:02AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @10:02AM (#418908)

      So speaks the anonymous coward. Back under your bridge!

      From another anonymous coward.

  • (Score: 2, Disagree) by VLM on Wednesday October 26 2016, @01:50PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 26 2016, @01:50PM (#418971)

    In an absolute sense it sounds mighty good. Don't get me wrong, if it was the only FOSS distro out there I'd be mighty happy with it.

    The problem is in a relative sense if you just install freebsd you'll have all the devuan features PLUS a thousand times as many users meaning 1000 times better odds debugging some obscure problem, plus you'll have zfs, pf, etc. I say this as a guy who subscribes to the Devuan mailing lists and hopes for their success as I STILL have legacy boxes out there that haven't converted to freebsd (something that hasn't changed from 1981 is everything in the business world seems to take ten times longer than anticipated, so when I estimate five times utterly ridiculous, it still falls half short, mostly due to an infinite stream of business logic related firefighting. I have coworkers who think my full legal name is "OMG I forgot to tell you this needs to be done a week ago if not sooner ... " no that's not my Fing name just because its how every conversation we've ever had starts....)

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @02:52PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @02:52PM (#419011)

      But when still using a Linux kernel you get more mature hardware support, an almost infinite choice of filesystems, LUKS etc.

      • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 26 2016, @03:24PM

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 26 2016, @03:24PM (#419018)

        All that matters is my hardware is supported and the list of hardware is accurate so I buy the right stuff. With the rush to virtualization I'm way more interested in support of VirtIO_pci0 than some random ether card anyway.

        By LUKS you probably mean dm-crypt support to encrypt partitions. The project name you don't know to google for that already included in freebsd is "GELI" that supposedly does a pretty good or equivalent job. I have no personal experience with partition encryption under linux or freebsd, somehow its just never come up. AFAIK GELI has a good reputation. From a known-plaintext standpoint, whole disk encryption makes me nervous. I mean if someone had a known plaintext attack wouldn't whole disk encryption be exactly what they'd recommend their victims do? Also, who exactly am I protecting myself from by hiding /bin/ls ? If the system gets powned or I lose physical security shouldn't I assume they completely pwn the device anyway regardless of encryption on the disk?

        I don't really see myself pining for the old days of ext2 or ReiserFS if I have access to ZFS that being one of the killer features. Both freebsd and linux have FUSE support of course. And encfs and iso9660 for legacy media etc etc. I concede if you do legacy recovery or forensics you might need minix FS or something truly weird and linux only. Of course special projects can use special tools without changing the standard loadout.

        In summary I'd agree that theoretically there could be valid reasons, none of which I've run into in practice.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Unixnut on Wednesday October 26 2016, @09:24PM

      by Unixnut (5779) on Wednesday October 26 2016, @09:24PM (#419156)

      Devuan seems pretty solid, as it is based on Debian.

      Since Devuan came out, I gradually switched over all my Debian systems to Devuan, including company production machines, with no problems what so ever (except the storage server, went with FreeBSD for that). Everything is stable as a rock, which doesn't surprise me. After all Devuan is still Debian, so apart from housekeeping (i.e. stripping out systemD when it rears its ugly head) it is pretty much fine.

      Think of it less as a completely new distro, and more like a wrapper around Debian, that removes some problematic error-prone cruft that has accumulated in the parent distro. It doesn't need the same amount of manpower is a completely new distro in order to be functional.