Those of you who have been following the Debian project for the last 2 to 3 years or so are probably acquainted with the turmoil caused by the distribution’s decision to ditch the classic Unix style init process manager, known as System V or SysV, and move to the newer, Red Hat driven process manager named systemd.
If you haven’t heard about it before, this post should bring you up to date: VUA Are Keeping Their Promise, Going Ahead With Forking Debian.
In Linux, a process manager, otherwise known as init – short for initialization, (usually) means it’s the first process started during booting sequence to which all other subsequent processes are tied to. It is rather an important part of any Linux distribution (or OS in general), and may have a significant impact on the distribution’s performance and behavior.
Devuan 1.0 “Jessie”
The release of Devuan 1.0 “Jessie” is the first ever release of a distribution that is based on Debian – post defaulting to systemd – which doesn’t include systemd by default.
In fact, Devuan defaults to SysV and offers openrc, runit, sinit as alternatives.
To its developers, “Devuan is about choice”. the ability to choose the init of your liking represents the freedom of the distribution, which they believe “is the Debian that was and could have been”.
Note: Debian’s slogan refer to it as “the universal operating system”, however, one of systemd’s biggest criticism is that it forms a system of interlocked dependencies, causing more user-space software to depend on its components. Thus the VUA (core group of Devuan developers, most of them used to be Debian contributors, maintainers, etc) beg to differ.
The release of Devuan Jessie 1.0 comes after there’s been no significant bug reports filed against its second release candidate. It is a long term support release meant to be supported beyond “the planned lifespan of Debian Jessie”. The default desktop environment of Devuan at the moment is Xfce.
Considering it a very important milestone, Devuan team looks to broaden its user base which will help the distribution base itself and grow larger in the future.
“And now with this Stable release we anticipate that even the most skeptical among private and enterprise users will finally be ready to jump on the Devuan train.”
Devuan and the importance of init freedom video
Get Devuan
At the moment, Devuan offers direct downloads of Jessie from HTTP or FTP sources, RSYNC mirrors and also torrent downloads.
You can choose between live-ISO, installer-ISO, minimal-live, virtual (for virtual machine) and embedded IMG file downloads.
All of which are available on the official Devuan site to which you can get to by clicking here.
