SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Almost a year and a half in the making, Devuan no longer is an Alpha-stage Linux distribution. A major site overhaul salutes the rollout of the first Beta release:
https://beta.devuan.org/
Here is an excerpt from an article from The Register on the release:
The effort to create a systemd-free Debian fork has borne fruit, with a beta of "Devuan Jessie" appearing in the wild.
Devuan came into being after a rebellion by a self-described "Veteran Unix Admin collective" argued that Debian had betrayed its roots and was becoming too desktop-oriented. The item to which they objected most vigorously was the inclusion of the systemd bootloader. The rebels therefore decided to fork Debian and "preserve Init freedom". The group renamed itself and its distribution "Devuan" and got [to] work, promising a fork that looked, felt, and quacked like Debian in all regards other than imposing systemd as the default Init option.
[...] Kudos, though, to the group for getting it out there! Now to see if there's really a groundswell of support for the cause of "Init freedom", as the greybeards name their cause.
The inclusion of systemd appears not to be holding rival Linux distros back: our review of Ubuntu 16.04 suggests it will be a speed bump for most users. Our Debian Jessie review said it slices a few seconds off boot times but is removable with little fuss for those who would prefer to go their own way at startup time. ®
How many people have been using this distro out of their worry over systemd's voracious appetite of everything standing between the kernel and the user? What are others using who share similar worries but have turned to other distros?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 29 2016, @08:18PM
Does devuan get security updates by now? Last time I checked it did not.
There is still quite a bit of way to go before devuan is a serious distribution. So far it is mostly a toy OS, made by people with little understanding of how Linux actually works. But it's highly entertaining watching them struggle through the wonderland.
Highlight so far was the website that was misconfigured for weeks so that nobody that had visited devuan.org was allowed to download the distribution (the file server was HTTP only, but devuan.org told browsers to only ever use HTTPS on any site below devuan.org). Guess that can happen to any venerable unix admin:-)
https://mobile.twitter.com/ShitDevuanSays [twitter.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 30 2016, @12:34PM
The https:// breakage was awesome, right. For those lurking: the Devuan junior admins enabled HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security) for devuan.org and *all* subdomains and forced users to use HTTPS everywhere, however their download page had no HTTPS, so people failed to download. I helped them with that problem as it was too sad to see them struggle to understand the issue.
They also managed to not be able to renew SSL certificates for a good month around the same time :D
(Score: 2, Informative) by nextime on Saturday April 30 2016, @07:32PM
Yes, it has security update, under deb http://packages.devuan.org/merged [devuan.org] jessie-security repo.
As for the HTTPS, the issue was an expired certificate from startssl and we encountered the weekly limits for letsencrypt, that doesn't allow you to get more than 5 certificates per week, and, as we were in alpha stage, deliberately choosed to wait.
Anyway, if you prefer to continue your trolling and hate speech, do that, we are working for what we think is the right way to do.
DISCLAIMER: i'm one of the "VUA" collective and devuan developer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 01 2016, @07:37AM
Just for the record: The security repository was added *after* the AC asked whether there is a security repository.
There was none for the beta release and if you install the beta you need to add the security repo manually after the install.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 01 2016, @07:43AM
Stand by your fuck-ups and occasionally have a laugh about them. That reduces stress and makes for a longer life.
Looking at the fuckups made by a distribution and how those are handled is important to me when deciding what to install. Maintainers that are open about their minor fuck-ups are more likely to actually admit their big ones, too.