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Deeo Kain writes:

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?

Original Submission