Devuan 4.0 “Chimaera”
We haven’t given much attention to Devuan lately, which is remiss of us because it’s surely the world’s premier Systemd-free distro. Devuan offers a choice of the old (sysvinit), the new (runit) and the inbetween (OpenRC). Besides that, it’s based on Debian 11.1, features a 5.10 series kernel and can now run “virtually all” desktop environments in the Debian repositories. This is good because we still see unenlightened tech journalists bashing Gnome for being dependent on Systemd, when Gnome has for many years been fully functional through elogind, the Systemd-free login daemon.
Pulseaudio is also optional in this release, and if you want to use Pipewire for audio then it’ll probably be much more difficult to set that up in Devuan than in Ubuntu (which only involves installing a couple of packages) or Fedora (where it’s working out of the box). Devuan inherits all the new accessibility features from the Debian installer too. So visually impaired people can use a Braille display or speech synthesis. This support extends into the installation, and one reason for not wanting Pulseaudio is that it prevents speech synthesis being available to both GUI and console applications. The Orca screen reader from Gnome performs the oration, and if you don’t need it (or any speech synthesis) then you can opt out at install time. You also have a choice of login/display managers. The lightweight Slim is still the default, but the slimline lightdm is also available. New in this release are sddm and gdm3, the ideal gatekeepers for KDE Plasma and Gnome, respectively. Like Debian, Devuan is still doing a 32-bit (i386) release, as well as supporting PowerPc (ppc64el) and three different flavours of ARM architecture. There are also mini, netinstall-style ISOs as well as unofficial Docker images available.
Oh, and we’d love to have put the live Xfce desktop environment on the DVD, but once again the ginormous Ubuntu ISO made this impossible, so we only have the server edition. You can add the Xfce desktop with sudo apt install task-xfce-desktop . There are instructions for installing only the core Xfce bits and pieces at www.devuan.org/os/documentation/ dev1fanboy/en/minimal-xfce-install.html, if you prefer a more minimal desktop experience. If you’re already running Beowulf, the previous Devuan release, then it’s simple to upgrade. And likewise if you’re running Debian Bullseye then it’s easy to migrate with a few edits to your Apt sources file. Again, you’ll find comprehensive instructions on the website.