Devuan: Debian Without Systemd

Last month we wrote about a group of administrations planning to fork Debian GNU/Linux over not liking its direction due to adopting systemd over Upstart or SysVInit. The Debian administrators have made good on their word and announced the Devuan fork of Debian.

Published yesterday was the big Devuan announcement. The Devuan fork is aimed to provide Debian without systemd. The announcement says, "First mid-term goal is to produce a reliable and minimalist base distribution that stays away from the homogenization and lock-in promoted by systemd. This distribution should be ready about the time Debian Jessie is ready and will constitute a seamless alternative to its dist-upgrade. As of today, the only ones resisting are the Slackware and Gentoo distributions, but we need to provide a solid ground also for apt-get based distributions. All project on the downstream side of Debian that are concerned by the systemd avalanche are welcome to keep an eye on our initiative and evaluate it as an alternative base. We will work carefully to make it a viable possibility and our primary goal here will be a clean removal of systemd and its dependencies, rebuilding and patching packages when necessary."

More information on Devuan is also available from Devuan.org.