Not sure if this is the right place to email this, but I gave up on Devuan, and thought someone should hear my feedback.

I'm not a newbie at Linux. I've been using it as my daily driver for the past 15 years. I've successfully installed Linux From Scratch, Gentoo, Void, Artix, Arch (many times), as well as more beginner-oriented distros like Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora and Endeavour without problems. Currently using Gentoo, Void and Artix as my daily drivers on different machines.

Devuan is the most "significant" non-systemd distro I hadn't tried, so I was curious. I thought it would be easier to install than the ones I'm used to, if anything. But I was wrong.

The computer I was using doesn't have an ethernet connection available, so I had to install over wifi. Booted into the (network install) iso. No firmware available for my wifi. A little annoying, but fair enough; I appreciate it not wanting to use too much non-free stuff by default. It asks me to load it from removable media. Figured that would be OK. I actually have 5 drives connected to the system, three of which had partitions with the necessary firmware on it. (Two of them ext4, one of them fat32.) Installer couldn't find it anywhere however (although it doesn't report that; it just proceeds and then fails exchanging keys). Tried escaping to the (very limited) shell. Running mount directly gives me uninterpretable errors (just "bad argument", I think) for all the relevant partitions.

OK, rebooted into Gentoo. Couldn't find any relevant documentation on the devuan site, but some debian related discussions online suggest it should be on a FAT32 usb stick. Not sure why it wasn't working with the FAT32 partition I already had, but oh well. I had to wipe another USB stick to reformat as FAT32 and install the firmware.

Was finally able to complete the installer process. Chose runit as the init system, since I've used runit on Void and Artix.

Rebooted. UEFI cannot find grub.

Back into gentoo. Mounted the partitions of the Devuan install and discovered that it installed the kernel and initramfs file on the main partition rather than the EFI partition for inexplicable reasons. So I manually copied them to the right partition and bypassed grub by using efibootmgr to create an appropriate boot option.

Devuan finally boots.

At login prompt, tried to log in as the user I created during on the installer. It tells me my password is wrong. OK, tried to log in as root. Tells me my password is wrong. Tried again in case I misstyped. Still wrong. The installer asked me to type and retype the passwords to confirm they're the same. I am quite confident I did not type the wrong thing four times (twice for each user) during the install, so this was pretty inexplicable.

Back into gentoo. Chroot into the devuan install and manually change the passwords.

Reboot devuan. OK, finally, I'm in.

No wifi. It must be possible somehow since the installer connected. (User friendly distros often copy the network configuration used during the install for you. If this were something like Arch or Gentoo where you install through a chroot I would have made sure the services I need for wifi were installed and enabled prior to rebooting the new installation, but the Devuan installer does not give you the opportunity to install anything else.)

Look around to see what's available. Looked for networkmanager and connman (mentioned as options in this documentation page here – https://www.devuan.org/os/documentation … ation.html – though "connman" is mispelled there), but they're not installed by the installer I guess. Of course there's no way for me to install them without network access. Other tools I've used for wifi like iwd, dhcpcd, openresolv, etc., are also missing.

But it looks like wpa_supplicant and dhclient are there. OK, I used wpa_supplicant on Linux From Scratch, so this should be doable.

Tried to enable them. Runit's services directory has no services for them.

Ran wpa_supplicant directly just as a program rather than service. It says it finds my card and everything is OK, but wifi scan cannot find any networks. Tried in vain to find any documentation whatsoever that might help at all. Devuan has next to no documentation, period.

Gave up. Maybe if I needed it for any real reason and wasn't just installing out of curiosity it might be worth trying to do more, but as is, this was my limit. How could this be harder than Linux From Scratch?

Really not trying to bash anyone; I know maintaining a distro is hard work. But I figure you would appreciate honest feedback from someone like me. At least you should consider making wifi-installs and configuration more straightforward and/or better documented, especially. Most people would have given up even sooner.

The world is left to wonder if the recent news of a Debian fork is an important event or a minor historical footnote. Either way, it seems like a good story, reminiscent of the Linux stories of the past, when the community really looked and behaved like a collection of individuals rather than a corporate fan club.

Although Devuan might be a niche distribution, clearly it is a thriving one.