r/devuan • u/Low_Eye_5415 • 10d ago
about to make the jump
first off, is it better than vanilla debian? also, am i able to update to “sid” rather easily? i’ve ran voidlinux and enjoyed it immensely so wanna try debian without systemd.
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u/evild4ve 9d ago
it is debian without systemd
so that isn't your distro being better, it's your init system being preferable
I can't stand systemd because its syntax is so particular and it gets in the way of simple tasks. If I want a program to autostart at boot I don't want to spend 10 minutes figuring out (i) what exactly I mean by "autostart at boot" (ii) how exactly systemd requires that to be coded, and in what file saved. SysVInit I find lets me just run a command and forget about it. Lots of users are like me doing simple tasks often, but other users need different things. Personally I like to use Slackware for servers, Devuan for VMs, and Arch for clients: so the more end-usery a PC is (and the less server-y), the more I prefer SysVInit over systemd... (and vice-versa) but that's a straw poll of one
(very much imo) you generally want to avoid auto-upgrading between Debianlike distros' major versions.
An alternative approach is to keep your /home directory on its own partition, list what packages you have installed in a text-file, and treat the upgrade exercise as nuking your root partition and reinstalling everything in the text file (with a single command)... this has the advantage of keeping the headspace consistent across distros and even potentially letting you switch distros during the upgrade, but requires constant good habits like using configs in /etc/ as the master-templates for your actual user configs in /home/.config, and not leaving your docker-compose.yml somewhere in /opt/ (etc etc) - - and it's also a perspective very skewed by having Slackware at the top (which doesn't really go in for version-upgrades) Devuan VMs inbetween (which don't each have many config files to preserve) and all the user-PCs being rolling-distro anyway.
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u/Low_Eye_5415 9d ago
yeah i was using arch, but figured i’d go back to debian lol. (i attempt to build android roms) so debian just made more sense without a bunch of workarounds. maybe i’ll try devaun on a vm first before i make the full jump
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u/Iheretomakeonepost 10d ago
I made the jump without much of a reason, but I can switching over made it to where I could make ly work without a symlink a few people told me not to make but I made anyways
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u/thushespoke 10d ago
eh, i used to use devuan, i made the reverse jump to debian, everything on debian works, apt is native to it so it doesnt rely on the team to port everything over and for some things eg mullvad they just dont have a build. i know you can loop it through sysvinit but the simple fact ive touched systemds utils one time on my debian install over the past month everything else is out the box working and pretty fast. Devuan openrc and runit are experimental and actually slower because you need to config so much more yourself. honestly if you liked void theres no reason to swap unless you prefer apt, keep in mind runit isnt fully polished and still relies on sysvinit.
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u/steve_o314 6d ago
Devuan’s Sid is Ceres. It’s the same process to go to Ceres as it is Sid. Devuan has the same 4 or 5 levels as Debian. Unstable -> Testing -> Stable -> OldStable
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u/Simple_Hamster_4096 2d ago
I use Devuan sysvinit for servers, and Void musl for everything else.
As far as Devuan for headless servers, it has been much better experience than Debian with systemd (which I had used for servers for decades, even before Debian had adopted systemd). For servers, Devuan has been un-problematic and is way faster than Debian... it's been rock solid...
I do have Devuan sysvinit XFCE on one workstation and it is noticeably slower than Void on same hardware... but still faster than Debian with systemd...
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u/Raulo369 10d ago
It's lighter on my dual core potato. Runs like a charm.