11 ms·

Devuan “ASCII” 2.0 Release Candidate is now available

64 points by tgragnato 8y ago

_jal 8y ago
Great timing for me. Just got the last of the parts in to build a network audio player, waiting for the weekend to start on it. I'll use this instead of Raspian.
- freedomben 8y ago
  Why do you want to use sysvinit over systemd? Do you have init scripts already written that you don't want to port?
  - frankharv 8y ago
    Well binary logs seem to be a good enough reason for me. I use FreeBSD and Devuan feels like I am in control. Some commercial software won't work on FreeBSD so I have to use some Linux. I also use Alpine because it uses OpenRC. With gLibc missing it is tough to compile some software. Compared, Devuan seems to be very software compatible and offers the familiarity of Debian. Over at FreeBSD we have loads of new users thanks to systemd. Keep up the great work RedHat.
    - iforgotpassword 8y ago
      That's why I have a wildcard redirect to rsyslogd, the journal is pretty much mirrored in text form in /var/log. I still think systemd is by far the best init system around. Service files are a trillion times cleaner, easier to understand and maintain than those bloated 90% copy and past init scripts with the retarded archaic run level concept. Really, if I had a reasonable amount of free time left I'd start something like systemd lite which is just the init part and none of the other bullshit. You could already just use that part but there is still quite a bit of crap around that could just be removed.
      - JdeBP 8y ago
        You need to learn about uselessd. And you need to stop committing the fallacy of allowing for only two systems in the world, systemd and van Smoorenburg init+rc. This fallacy was called out by the author of uselessd. * http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/ http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/ * http://jdebp.eu./FGA/run-scripts-and-service-units-side-by-side.html http://jdebp.eu./FGA/run-scripts-and-service-units-side-by-s...
    - gsich 8y ago
      I hear the binary logging argument very often. What is bad with it? Is the format not specified? Maybe it is more efficient to log this way. Often it comes down to "it's not text, which I don't like, ergo binary is bad".
  - _jal 8y ago
    Several reasons, the largest of which is that I dislike systemd. I'm not going to rehash the arguments that have been had thousands of times, just put me in 'that' bucket. Other reasons include that I like to support alternate distros, I'm curious as to how they've done with it so far, and this is a low-resource device so I don't want unnecessary junk like journald wasting cycles.
- newnewpdro 8y ago
  While I think it's great you have the option, it doesn't strike me as the best choice.
  - _jal 8y ago
    Thanks for sharing your carefully considered analysis. Care to walk me through your minimax of the various tradeoffs that went into my design, including the janky custom software I'll run on it?
nextos 8y ago
Devuan is basically Debian without systemd. While I still prefer to run Linux distributions with systemd (NixOS and Arch in particular), I'm increasingly worried about the complexity systemd brings in. I like how clean and standardized the init process is now. I don't like the bloat prize we've paid, though. I've been stracing my workstation for a few days. Journald starts eating a ton of RAM, ~100 MB upon boot, and keeps growing. I'm annoyed because systemd developers claim 100 MB is normal. It's not, that's my biggest process on startup. And on my other Arch machine it stays at 25 MB, and they have a long history of memory leaks.
- newnewpdro 8y ago
  > Journald starts eating a ton of RAM, ~100 MB upon boot, and keeps growing. You must subtract shared from resident to determine how much memory has been "eaten". Journald uses mmap() for random access within the journal files. These pages are accounted for as shared because they are file-backed and may be paged out by the kernel behind the scenes if memory is needed - they'll just be paged back in from the filesystem if accessed later by journald.
- craftyguy 8y ago
  see newnewpdro's comment. I just built a headless armv7h system (using Arch Linux ARM) with 1GB of RAM, and after being up for 3 days running nginx, ssh, and some other bare services, the total RAM usage, for all applications, is 70-100MB. Systemd is complex, but it really doesn't seem to add a lot of resource drain for the power it give you... I'm happy with that tradeoff.
  - tannhaeuser 8y ago
    Out of curiosity, to start nginx and sshd you need like 2 lines of shell code in a BSDish rc.conf - one for starting each service. Why do you think systemd bringing in 10s and 100s of megabytes of black magic binary code is a trade-off worth making, especially on a non-desktop without a need for reacting on up/down events of network interfaces?
    - 8y ago
trollian 8y ago
I appreciate that they named their release after a no longer suitable character encoding. It does seem like a lot of trouble to go to to troll the systemd haters though.
- gsich 8y ago
  compare this to sysvinit, a no longer suitable init process.
  - sverige 8y ago
    I have yet to hear the argument that convinces me sysvinit (or openrc or runit) was "no longer suitable." In need of updating and revision? Sure. So broken that a completely new init that swallowed up a bunch of other processes and services was the best answer? Hardly. Systemd was initially sold as providing faster boot times. Objections to its cancerous spread to other services beyond init were dismissed without providing any good reasons for why it was necessary or even desirable beyond "we're doing it, quit complaining." The changeover at Debian was handled so poorly and with such rancor that many from there still have a bad taste in their mouths. Devuan was one response to that, and a good one. Artix was the response to Arch adopting systemd. Slackware and Gentoo and other older distros have stayed away from it. And as another commenter noted, lots of people have abandoned Linux for the BSDs. The systemd fallout is demonstrating something I always thought was the weakest part of Linux compared to the BSDs, which is that the Linux userland is developed completely independently of the kernel. People do whatever the fuck they want, and frequently the relationships seem to be hostile. I don't think systemd really solves that problem, either, but rather makes it much more complex and fragile. Hopefully the ecosystem will continue to support non-systemd distros in the long term.
    - vbernat 8y ago
      > Systemd was initially sold as providing faster boot times. Systemd was not about speed. Speed is a side-effect of correctly handling ordering. See http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.
hedora 8y ago
I’ve been running the beta on my desktop. In this release, they have also established sane defaults for a wider range of window managers and desktop environments. The rough edges I’ve hit can all be attributed to systemd brain damage (like the fact that the linux kernel no longer has a working, synchronous, “probe the network cards and create a logical interface for each one” primitive). My only beef with devuan is that the beta install I have runs systemd’s elogind. It seems stable enough under devuan, but routinely broke under back when this machine was actually running systemd, and I plan to cleanse it with fire if it is still there after I update to stable 2.0. I highly recommend devuan. Unlike Ubuntu, debian regularly rebuilds everything from source, and ~95% of their packages have reproducible builds. For me, this, plus pre-systemd levels of stability and debuggability is a winning combination.
- chupasaurus 8y ago
  I think elogind is used because at least Gnome and KDE are dependent on logind.
  - hedora 8y ago
    Thanks. I don’t use either of those. (Also, does “gnome” include “mate” in this context, I wonder?)
- matthewbauer 8y ago
  Is there an alternative to elogind? From what I can tell most software needs it.
- vbernat 8y ago
  > The rough edges I’ve hit can all be attributed to systemd brain damage (like the fact that the linux kernel no longer has a working, synchronous, “probe the network cards and create a logical interface for each one” primitive). Multithreaded device probing exists far before systemd. It was introduced around Linux 2.6.18.
  - tialaramex 8y ago
kbumsik 8y ago
Why they use "ASCII" for a distro release? This is so confusing name for people who don't know what Devuan is. I firstly thought some wierd guys created their own character encoding and claimed 2.0 version of ASCII.
- sverige 8y ago
  Devuan aliases its releases using minor planet names as codenames.
- JdeBP 8y ago
  As mentioned, the release codenames are those of minor planets. It was how the Devuan people chose to synchronize with "Jessie" when they forked, since there is an asteroid (discovered in 1979) with the same name as the Toy Story character, and then branch onto a new naming system. * https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=2003568 https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=2003568 * https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=10464 https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=10464 * https://devuan.org/os/releases https://devuan.org/os/releases
- wicket 8y ago
  That's like asking why use "Stretch" for a Debian release. Anyone who doesn't know what Debian is might think it's a new version of the Toy Story character it's named after. Linux distribution naming conventions are often weird, there's nothing new here.
minieggs 8y ago
Couples week since I distro hopped.... Guess it's about time...
dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
Devan is an useful and important distro. I just hope they integrate back with Debian at some point (I don't know how, but I'd love o see that happen.)
- sverige 8y ago
  That seems unlikely unless Debian drops systemd or the ecosystem becomes so dependent on systemd's ever-expanding reach that it becomes impossible to build a Linux distro without it.
  - irl_ 8y ago
    Debian doesn't actually have anything against sysvinit or OpenRC. Those are just not the defaults. Both sysvinit and OpenRC are available in Debian. It probably would be easier to have a non-systemd system were the Devuan developers to upstream their packaging and patches to Debian. As Devuan has a stated goal of not using systemd though, I would guess they take the easy route of not maintaining systemd compatibility. The longer it remains a fork without effort to upstream changes, the more it would diverge and the more work it would be. It would also be more work to keep the fork going, so I guess at some point it would either have to be a hard fork or it would die.
    - sverige 8y ago
      From 2014-06-11 systemd news: > * The support for SysV and LSB init scripts has been removed from the systemd daemon itself. Instead, it is now implemented as a generator that creates native systemd units from these scripts when needed. This enables us to remove a substantial amount of legacy code from PID 1, following the fact that many distributions only ship a very small number of LSB/SysV init scripts nowadays. At the earliest possible opportunity, systemd removed everything they could that supported alternative init systems. So no, it is not trivial to take a Debian release and make it run SysVinit or OpenRC. In fact, it was so much work that the Devuan devs expended the effort to fork, including setting up a website, mailing lists, IRC channels, a bug-tracker, and all the other infrastructure necessary to maintain a serious, well-supported distro. And as far as "upstreaming" to Debian, how is Debian upstream for SysVinit or OpenRC? Both of those are separate projects not owned by Debian.
self_awareness 8y ago
Don't want to troll or anything, just a question from curiosity: don't you think that massive popularity of systemd is a result of a massive demand for software like systemd?
- chx 8y ago
  In short: no.
- lokopodium 8y ago
  "Still beats dealing with airlines" - South Park
- sunseb 8y ago
  No, it's because we, the users, have no other choice.
- badsectoracula 8y ago
  As i understand it, systemd provides some functionality that some people wanted, but not everyone was happy with how this functionality was implemented and/or provided (which included people who didn't need tht functionality in the first place) and others were annoyed by how it was pushed/promoted and became a dependency on some popular projects (e.g. Gnome) without a technical necessity for being so, feeling like it was forced on people who didn't wanted it but also making it harder to use other init systems (this is especially important since, as i already wrote, the provided functionality is desired by some people and could be provided in a better way by another init system). (note that with functionality here i do not refer to specific APIs or interfaces, but higher level functionality like "i want to be able to do XXX when YYY happens")
- spiraldancing 8y ago
  widespread use != massive popularity Ask your average Windows user.
- tannhaeuser 8y ago
  On the desktop where you need to deal with WLAN interfaces going up and down, maybe a monstrosity like systemd has its place, but even there my opinion is systemd just isn't worth fragmenting and polarizing the whole Unix ecosystem with systemd's total lack of mental discipline and attitude of wrapping each and everything under the sun including binary logging, mandatory systemd-only APIs for loggin in, cron replacement, etc. On the server-side where Linux has its mainstay, using systemd is even more pointless IMHO since services and network interfaces don't come and go. Loosing portability for saving a couple lines of shell code for starting/stopping services is IMHO a trade-off that just doesn't make sense from an engineering PoV. All the more so since systemd doesn't shield you from the intricacies of dealing with demon programs; if something is going south on your server, have fun with systemd binary logs to analyze what has happened. Now RedHat (who are shouldering a large part of Linux development anyway) sure aren't stupid; therefore I have to conclude that they're playing the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish game here to subvert Linux into SystemD-OS. Devuan has become a very important key project to prevent that from happening to the Debian code base. Btw congrats to the Devuan project! I wasn't quite sure they'd be able to deliver a couple years ago when they started; now I think Devuan (along with Gentoo, Slackware, Alpine) is going to save Linux' ass as a "real" F/OSS community effort going forward, no less. My hope is Arch Linux with its great community and documentation gets a systemd-less fork as well.
ryanpcmcquen 8y ago
Thank goodness for Slackware and Devuan.
- krylon 8y ago
  If you dislike systemd, Void Linux might be worth looking into as well. And of course, Gentoo is still around, for those of us with too much time and too many spare CPU cycles on their hands. ;-)
  - olakease 8y ago
    Been using void for a couple of years. I could not be happier with it. I also need a non-systemd distro for production, found this project https://github.com/cloux/aws-devuan https://github.com/cloux/aws-devuan it's devuan + runit for aws.
digi_owl 8y ago
It is really sad how quickly this was voted off the front page...

64 points by tgragnato 8y ago

_jal 8y ago

Great timing for me. Just got the last of the parts in to build a network audio player, waiting for the weekend to start on it. I'll use this instead of Raspian.

freedomben 8y ago
Why do you want to use sysvinit over systemd? Do you have init scripts already written that you don't want to port?
- frankharv 8y ago
  Well binary logs seem to be a good enough reason for me. I use FreeBSD and Devuan feels like I am in control. Some commercial software won't work on FreeBSD so I have to use some Linux. I also use Alpine because it uses OpenRC. With gLibc missing it is tough to compile some software. Compared, Devuan seems to be very software compatible and offers the familiarity of Debian. Over at FreeBSD we have loads of new users thanks to systemd. Keep up the great work RedHat.
  - iforgotpassword 8y ago
    That's why I have a wildcard redirect to rsyslogd, the journal is pretty much mirrored in text form in /var/log. I still think systemd is by far the best init system around. Service files are a trillion times cleaner, easier to understand and maintain than those bloated 90% copy and past init scripts with the retarded archaic run level concept. Really, if I had a reasonable amount of free time left I'd start something like systemd lite which is just the init part and none of the other bullshit. You could already just use that part but there is still quite a bit of crap around that could just be removed.
    - JdeBP 8y ago
      You need to learn about uselessd. And you need to stop committing the fallacy of allowing for only two systems in the world, systemd and van Smoorenburg init+rc. This fallacy was called out by the author of uselessd. * http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/ http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/ * http://jdebp.eu./FGA/run-scripts-and-service-units-side-by-side.html http://jdebp.eu./FGA/run-scripts-and-service-units-side-by-s...
  - gsich 8y ago
    I hear the binary logging argument very often. What is bad with it? Is the format not specified? Maybe it is more efficient to log this way. Often it comes down to "it's not text, which I don't like, ergo binary is bad".
- _jal 8y ago
  Several reasons, the largest of which is that I dislike systemd. I'm not going to rehash the arguments that have been had thousands of times, just put me in 'that' bucket. Other reasons include that I like to support alternate distros, I'm curious as to how they've done with it so far, and this is a low-resource device so I don't want unnecessary junk like journald wasting cycles.
newnewpdro 8y ago
While I think it's great you have the option, it doesn't strike me as the best choice.
- _jal 8y ago
  Thanks for sharing your carefully considered analysis. Care to walk me through your minimax of the various tradeoffs that went into my design, including the janky custom software I'll run on it?

nextos 8y ago

Devuan is basically Debian without systemd. While I still prefer to run Linux distributions with systemd (NixOS and Arch in particular), I'm increasingly worried about the complexity systemd brings in. I like how clean and standardized the init process is now. I don't like the bloat prize we've paid, though. I've been stracing my workstation for a few days. Journald starts eating a ton of RAM, ~100 MB upon boot, and keeps growing. I'm annoyed because systemd developers claim 100 MB is normal. It's not, that's my biggest process on startup. And on my other Arch machine it stays at 25 MB, and they have a long history of memory leaks.

newnewpdro 8y ago
> Journald starts eating a ton of RAM, ~100 MB upon boot, and keeps growing. You must subtract shared from resident to determine how much memory has been "eaten". Journald uses mmap() for random access within the journal files. These pages are accounted for as shared because they are file-backed and may be paged out by the kernel behind the scenes if memory is needed - they'll just be paged back in from the filesystem if accessed later by journald.
craftyguy 8y ago
see newnewpdro's comment. I just built a headless armv7h system (using Arch Linux ARM) with 1GB of RAM, and after being up for 3 days running nginx, ssh, and some other bare services, the total RAM usage, for all applications, is 70-100MB. Systemd is complex, but it really doesn't seem to add a lot of resource drain for the power it give you... I'm happy with that tradeoff.
- tannhaeuser 8y ago
  Out of curiosity, to start nginx and sshd you need like 2 lines of shell code in a BSDish rc.conf - one for starting each service. Why do you think systemd bringing in 10s and 100s of megabytes of black magic binary code is a trade-off worth making, especially on a non-desktop without a need for reacting on up/down events of network interfaces?
  - 8y ago

trollian 8y ago

I appreciate that they named their release after a no longer suitable character encoding. It does seem like a lot of trouble to go to to troll the systemd haters though.

gsich 8y ago
compare this to sysvinit, a no longer suitable init process.
- sverige 8y ago
  I have yet to hear the argument that convinces me sysvinit (or openrc or runit) was "no longer suitable." In need of updating and revision? Sure. So broken that a completely new init that swallowed up a bunch of other processes and services was the best answer? Hardly. Systemd was initially sold as providing faster boot times. Objections to its cancerous spread to other services beyond init were dismissed without providing any good reasons for why it was necessary or even desirable beyond "we're doing it, quit complaining." The changeover at Debian was handled so poorly and with such rancor that many from there still have a bad taste in their mouths. Devuan was one response to that, and a good one. Artix was the response to Arch adopting systemd. Slackware and Gentoo and other older distros have stayed away from it. And as another commenter noted, lots of people have abandoned Linux for the BSDs. The systemd fallout is demonstrating something I always thought was the weakest part of Linux compared to the BSDs, which is that the Linux userland is developed completely independently of the kernel. People do whatever the fuck they want, and frequently the relationships seem to be hostile. I don't think systemd really solves that problem, either, but rather makes it much more complex and fragile. Hopefully the ecosystem will continue to support non-systemd distros in the long term.
  - vbernat 8y ago
    > Systemd was initially sold as providing faster boot times. Systemd was not about speed. Speed is a side-effect of correctly handling ordering. See http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.

hedora 8y ago

I’ve been running the beta on my desktop. In this release, they have also established sane defaults for a wider range of window managers and desktop environments. The rough edges I’ve hit can all be attributed to systemd brain damage (like the fact that the linux kernel no longer has a working, synchronous, “probe the network cards and create a logical interface for each one” primitive). My only beef with devuan is that the beta install I have runs systemd’s elogind. It seems stable enough under devuan, but routinely broke under back when this machine was actually running systemd, and I plan to cleanse it with fire if it is still there after I update to stable 2.0. I highly recommend devuan. Unlike Ubuntu, debian regularly rebuilds everything from source, and ~95% of their packages have reproducible builds. For me, this, plus pre-systemd levels of stability and debuggability is a winning combination.

chupasaurus 8y ago
I think elogind is used because at least Gnome and KDE are dependent on logind.
- hedora 8y ago
  Thanks. I don’t use either of those. (Also, does “gnome” include “mate” in this context, I wonder?)
matthewbauer 8y ago
Is there an alternative to elogind? From what I can tell most software needs it.
vbernat 8y ago
> The rough edges I’ve hit can all be attributed to systemd brain damage (like the fact that the linux kernel no longer has a working, synchronous, “probe the network cards and create a logical interface for each one” primitive). Multithreaded device probing exists far before systemd. It was introduced around Linux 2.6.18.
- tialaramex 8y ago

kbumsik 8y ago

Why they use "ASCII" for a distro release? This is so confusing name for people who don't know what Devuan is. I firstly thought some wierd guys created their own character encoding and claimed 2.0 version of ASCII.

sverige 8y ago
Devuan aliases its releases using minor planet names as codenames.
JdeBP 8y ago
As mentioned, the release codenames are those of minor planets. It was how the Devuan people chose to synchronize with "Jessie" when they forked, since there is an asteroid (discovered in 1979) with the same name as the Toy Story character, and then branch onto a new naming system. * https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=2003568 https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=2003568 * https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=10464 https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=10464 * https://devuan.org/os/releases https://devuan.org/os/releases
wicket 8y ago
That's like asking why use "Stretch" for a Debian release. Anyone who doesn't know what Debian is might think it's a new version of the Toy Story character it's named after. Linux distribution naming conventions are often weird, there's nothing new here.

minieggs 8y ago

Couples week since I distro hopped.... Guess it's about time...

dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago

Devan is an useful and important distro. I just hope they integrate back with Debian at some point (I don't know how, but I'd love o see that happen.)

sverige 8y ago
That seems unlikely unless Debian drops systemd or the ecosystem becomes so dependent on systemd's ever-expanding reach that it becomes impossible to build a Linux distro without it.
- irl_ 8y ago
  Debian doesn't actually have anything against sysvinit or OpenRC. Those are just not the defaults. Both sysvinit and OpenRC are available in Debian. It probably would be easier to have a non-systemd system were the Devuan developers to upstream their packaging and patches to Debian. As Devuan has a stated goal of not using systemd though, I would guess they take the easy route of not maintaining systemd compatibility. The longer it remains a fork without effort to upstream changes, the more it would diverge and the more work it would be. It would also be more work to keep the fork going, so I guess at some point it would either have to be a hard fork or it would die.
  - sverige 8y ago
    From 2014-06-11 systemd news: > * The support for SysV and LSB init scripts has been removed from the systemd daemon itself. Instead, it is now implemented as a generator that creates native systemd units from these scripts when needed. This enables us to remove a substantial amount of legacy code from PID 1, following the fact that many distributions only ship a very small number of LSB/SysV init scripts nowadays. At the earliest possible opportunity, systemd removed everything they could that supported alternative init systems. So no, it is not trivial to take a Debian release and make it run SysVinit or OpenRC. In fact, it was so much work that the Devuan devs expended the effort to fork, including setting up a website, mailing lists, IRC channels, a bug-tracker, and all the other infrastructure necessary to maintain a serious, well-supported distro. And as far as "upstreaming" to Debian, how is Debian upstream for SysVinit or OpenRC? Both of those are separate projects not owned by Debian.

self_awareness 8y ago

Don't want to troll or anything, just a question from curiosity: don't you think that massive popularity of systemd is a result of a massive demand for software like systemd?

chx 8y ago
In short: no.
lokopodium 8y ago
"Still beats dealing with airlines" - South Park
sunseb 8y ago
No, it's because we, the users, have no other choice.
badsectoracula 8y ago
As i understand it, systemd provides some functionality that some people wanted, but not everyone was happy with how this functionality was implemented and/or provided (which included people who didn't need tht functionality in the first place) and others were annoyed by how it was pushed/promoted and became a dependency on some popular projects (e.g. Gnome) without a technical necessity for being so, feeling like it was forced on people who didn't wanted it but also making it harder to use other init systems (this is especially important since, as i already wrote, the provided functionality is desired by some people and could be provided in a better way by another init system). (note that with functionality here i do not refer to specific APIs or interfaces, but higher level functionality like "i want to be able to do XXX when YYY happens")
spiraldancing 8y ago
widespread use != massive popularity Ask your average Windows user.
tannhaeuser 8y ago
On the desktop where you need to deal with WLAN interfaces going up and down, maybe a monstrosity like systemd has its place, but even there my opinion is systemd just isn't worth fragmenting and polarizing the whole Unix ecosystem with systemd's total lack of mental discipline and attitude of wrapping each and everything under the sun including binary logging, mandatory systemd-only APIs for loggin in, cron replacement, etc. On the server-side where Linux has its mainstay, using systemd is even more pointless IMHO since services and network interfaces don't come and go. Loosing portability for saving a couple lines of shell code for starting/stopping services is IMHO a trade-off that just doesn't make sense from an engineering PoV. All the more so since systemd doesn't shield you from the intricacies of dealing with demon programs; if something is going south on your server, have fun with systemd binary logs to analyze what has happened. Now RedHat (who are shouldering a large part of Linux development anyway) sure aren't stupid; therefore I have to conclude that they're playing the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish game here to subvert Linux into SystemD-OS. Devuan has become a very important key project to prevent that from happening to the Debian code base. Btw congrats to the Devuan project! I wasn't quite sure they'd be able to deliver a couple years ago when they started; now I think Devuan (along with Gentoo, Slackware, Alpine) is going to save Linux' ass as a "real" F/OSS community effort going forward, no less. My hope is Arch Linux with its great community and documentation gets a systemd-less fork as well.

ryanpcmcquen 8y ago

Thank goodness for Slackware and Devuan.

krylon 8y ago
If you dislike systemd, Void Linux might be worth looking into as well. And of course, Gentoo is still around, for those of us with too much time and too many spare CPU cycles on their hands. ;-)
- olakease 8y ago
  Been using void for a couple of years. I could not be happier with it. I also need a non-systemd distro for production, found this project https://github.com/cloux/aws-devuan https://github.com/cloux/aws-devuan it's devuan + runit for aws.

digi_owl 8y ago

It is really sad how quickly this was voted off the front page...