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.

Comments

Not universal until it includes systemd

[lkcl]

caveat: systemd has done an insane amount of damage to the GNU/Linux eco-system. people are not really sure why, because it's not about the technical aspects per se, it's that the mindset of the developers *behind* systemd is psychologically damaged, and that mental instability is, by virtue of systemd being PID 1, subsequently spreading like a cancer throughout every single GNU/Linux distro that supports it. the cancer analogy is an appropriate one because it's not really visible until it's far too late.

so the fact that devuan takes a well-known stable distro and provides and maintains an "incremental" system to remove systemd is extremely good, and a huge relief. they've done an extremely competent job of modifying a few base packages then letting the repository "fall through" like an HTTP Transparent Proxy onto *standard* debian packages, such that the (small) team only has to maintain and host relatively few packages, NOT forty thousand, requiring over 100 gigabytes of space.

where devuan goes wrong is - and i really hesitate to say this - the hypocrisy of the claim that they are UNIVERSAL. if they were truly universal, they would have included systemd DESPITE ALL THE PROBLEMS IT CAUSES.

if they had done this, the simplest way to have done it would have been to include build profiles in the various packages xorg, pulesaudio, udev, samba and many more (in a constantly-increasing list) that instead of *REMOVING* systemd allowed building of PARALLEL packages with AND WITHOUT systemd, from the same debian source package.

if they had done that, then interestingly, debian could have considered picking up those modifications and including them *in* debian, thus making devuan's life easier rather than harder.

but they haven't done that, and the hypocrisy and lack of integrity towards the claim that they are "universal" is why i cannot use devuan: instead i use angband.pl on top of debian (and occasionally have to download the source of those packages, modify the build-deps and recompile them).

devuan is a backlash *against* something, and that never goes as people intend. mother theresa was the first person i learned this lesson from, after she famously was invited to an "anti-war" rally, she refused... and said "but if you ever have a peace rally, i'll be delighted to attend".