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Systemd-Free Devuan 2.0 'ASCII' Officially Released (devuan.org)
"Dear Init Freedom Lovers..." begins the announcement at Devuan.org:
We are happy to announce that Devuan GNU+Linux 2.0 ASCII Stable is finally available. Devuan is a GNU+Linux distribution committed to providing a universal, stable, dependable, free software operating system that uses and promotes alternatives to systemd and its components.
Devuan 2.0 ASCII runs on several architectures. Installer CD and DVD ISOs, as well as desktop-live and minimal-live ISOs, are available for i386 and amd64. Ready-to-use images can be downloaded for a number of ARM platforms and SOCs, including Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone, OrangePi, BananaPi, OLinuXino, Cubieboard, Nokia and Motorola mobile phones, and several Chromebooks, as well as for Virtualbox/QEMU/Vagrant. The Devuan 2.0 ASCII installer ISOs offer a variety of Desktop Environments including Xfce, KDE, MATE, Cinnamon, LXQt, with others available post-install. The expert install mode now offers a choice of either SysVinit or OpenRC as init system...
We would like to thank the entire Devuan community for the continued support, feedback, and collaboration....
The release notes include information on Devuan's new network of package repository mirrors, and they're also touting their "direct and easy upgrade paths" from Devuan Jessie, Debian Jessie and Debian Stretch.
Devuan 2.0 ASCII runs on several architectures. Installer CD and DVD ISOs, as well as desktop-live and minimal-live ISOs, are available for i386 and amd64. Ready-to-use images can be downloaded for a number of ARM platforms and SOCs, including Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone, OrangePi, BananaPi, OLinuXino, Cubieboard, Nokia and Motorola mobile phones, and several Chromebooks, as well as for Virtualbox/QEMU/Vagrant. The Devuan 2.0 ASCII installer ISOs offer a variety of Desktop Environments including Xfce, KDE, MATE, Cinnamon, LXQt, with others available post-install. The expert install mode now offers a choice of either SysVinit or OpenRC as init system...
We would like to thank the entire Devuan community for the continued support, feedback, and collaboration....
The release notes include information on Devuan's new network of package repository mirrors, and they're also touting their "direct and easy upgrade paths" from Devuan Jessie, Debian Jessie and Debian Stretch.
I was the second Debian project leader. These days, I prefer to run Devuan, a true Debian derivative engineered the way I would probably have decided to make it. It's efficient and trouble-free. Thanks to the Devuan developers for all of the work!
Bruce Perens.
Funny how people who support systemd are either blind or run a full memory purge after reading any story about systemd on /.. Good examples are all over the comments on /.. If you didn't see them, you're either new here or you pointedly missed them.
Funny how so many people claim systemd is a lousy architecture to build upon, yet never provide any evidence to support those claims
Nah, I did a fairly long analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of systemd in my journal. If you disagree, go ahead and tell me: it will increase my knowledge.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
https://ewontfix.com/14/ is a good article which goes into detail about why systemd is a bad architecture.
Actually, no.
SystemD is controlled primarily by Redhat employees -- and, they are very, very, very hostile to commits that aren't 100% behind their 'everything is a VM' goalposts. Even normal, sane bugs results in an almost instant screaming response, and closed bugs.
And fork? Pffft. That's what you're against, right? So, one can either fork systemd and 'do it right', or... not use it.
The same is true in devuan.
Devuan ASCII even rolled back on the removal of the libsystemd dependency that it started to removed in Jessie. Now the packages that were only changed to not depend on libsystemd are again taken straight from debian and include that again.
Devuan ASCII also ships with elogind, which provides the same APIs that systemd-logind provides on debian and undid all the changes that were in devuan jessie that removed the dependency on those APIs. They even celebrate that "archivement" in the devuan release notes!
Devuan ASCII is much closer to debian than devuan jessie was. The only non-trivial diff at this point is the branding and that they block the systemd deb (but none of the rest build from the same sources) from their distribution.
I do not understand why devuan is even hailed as systemd-free at this point. With jessie they at least tried to remove systemd tentacles, but they have given up on that entirely in ASCII.
ls -lh /lib/systemd/systemd /lib/systemd/systemd
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1.6M Feb 1 23:31
It's clearly not a lithe, slender little thing running as pid 1.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I don't remember anyone forcing me to use a systemd distro.
Then I guess you do not work where I work
But with that said, to me systemd has been a big meh. Had no issues with it nor does it excite me. At home I run Slackware and I find a bit faster and easier to deal with than what I use at work and personally, prefer it over other distros.
BTW my work hardware is more beefed-up than I have at home, but none of the performance has to do with systemd but with background tasks I need to have running at work.
Neither claim which is true. No logs have ever been dropped by systemd
Many people who have tried to troubleshoot early boot issues (mostly with RAID) disagree with you, including myself.
and the exit on failure is because the daemon fails after systemd did it's thing
*its
and people not fully understanding how asynchronous starting works.
Too bad they had to make it so complicated to understand. It just worked before.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's great to see a systemd-free distro making progress. Hope they keep releasing.
And remember, Slackware is the oldest GNU/Linux distro in active maintenance, and is also free of systemd. Even the development version (Slackware-current) has no systemd.
-- Look to the Rose that blows about us--"Lo, Laughing," she says, "into the World I blow..."
But mounting root at that stage is not the work of any init so if I have to guess the problem that you experienced with the degraded btrfs has to do with the initramfs image on your distribution and not with systemd, but having not seen this myself I will of course not say that systemd had nothing to do with it but it sounds odd since / is mounted before init is called by the booting kernel. And I've read many storied about default initramfs:s having trouble with degraded raid1 btrfs so I think you blamed systemd too early there.
Gnome are not vendor locked-in, their dependency upon logind is #1 something that can be disabled with a compile-flag and #2 the dependency is on the logind DBUS namespace and thus anyone can implement something that speaks that namespace (which is how the BSDs implemented it on their end). And the logind thing solves a problem for Gnome which is why they choose to go with it.
In the long term, that's bad for Linux. There's no reason that everything systemd does couldn't have been done the Unix way with smaller interchangeable tools that could inter-operate.
Which accidentally is just how the various systemd are implemented, it's a bunch of smaller interchangeable applications that inter-operate via DBUS. The only dependecy each tool have is the DBUS namespace so as long as you implement that you can change each and every systemd tool.