taking in consideration that devuan "its just a debian without systemd" (well made merge and proxy of their repositories)

debian strech was released and then ascii need to be release soon, so the original question its a constant reallity

Hello,

Since there are more people developing Debian, does it leave some chances to survive to Devuan. The idea / concept of Devuan is really cool, but what about it s future.

Bugs reporting but also fixing them are important issues.

Thank you

The success and development of one distribution isn't going to cripple the success of another distribution based on it with entirely different political and development goals. Devuan made the best choice they could in utilizing Debian as a base, which means that they can "leech" the user-base that used Debian, but wanted a more free and security-based distribution on the whole - they could then switch to Devuan. Personally for me, this was the case entirely. Debian seems more concerned with appealing to the general audience, often opting to bloat the distribution more than I need in order to appeal to a broader range of users, which isn't necessarily a bad move (if you don't mind double-backing on the more "ethical" approach to security or one's technical autonomy), it just cuts against some of my interests and desires. If there's a supply and there's a demand, there's little room for the failing of any project driven almost entirely by incentive and ethics.

The Dyne team are heavy-hitters and don't strike me at all as the type of people who build things that they aren't going to see through. They've literally churned out more creditable security-based projects than anyone out there, and every single project is highly regarded and respected in the various pools of individuals that float around in the multitude of privacy and opsec-related hubs. No one's a psychic, but I really don't see why anyone would have doubts about the legitimacy of a project like this. The world being as fucked as it is when it comes to the security and technical spaces almost guarantees Devuan's relevance; developers behind Devuan almost guarantee its excellence.

If a system has no bugs, no requests to change or improve anything, the perfect system, it will rank 200 in the distrowatch list.  It would be considered a dead
project and abandoned.  A good system in their logic is one that has too many bugs and every little step on clearing out 1% of them is a point release.

So much for indexing and rating scales marketing people devise.

Devuan 2 the final release

I think that I didn't explain the ratings system well enough.  A Distrowatch rating is based on the number of unique IP addresses visiting a vendor's website each day.  These numbers are averaged for each of the selected time frames, so that (as of this post) www.devuan.org has averaged 251 unique IP address visits a day over the past 6 months.  The reason there is a correlation between news articles/point releases/press releases and the Distrowatch rating is a bit obvious once it is explained, but if you don't read the "fine print" on distowatch.com my last post may be taken in the wrong way. 

For example let's look at Gentoo.  They very rarely announce anything in the press and they have rolling release style so it's extremely rare for them announce a new version.  On the other hand, anyone who uses Gentoo knows how important their forums and wiki are to keeping a system running smoothly.  So they get a lot of traffic without press releases and news articles being writen about them. 

Next look at the number 1 ranked distro, Mint.  I could use Mint blindfolded and with one arm tied behind my back.  Someone new to linux who has been told "Start with Mint, explore from there" will need to be looking up all sorts of stuff.  Since Mint is Ubuntu based, Ubuntu also gets some of Mint's traffic to their website (i.e. visits to wiki.ubuntu.com) as well as all of their own traffic.  Even Debian gets some traffic from Mint and Ubuntu users looking up information on wiki.debian.org and that's in addition to all of the Debian specific traffic. 

So my point is really that while Devuan may never be ranked number 1 on distrowatch.com it already has as much daily traffic to it's main site as Gentoo does on theirs.  Devuan's web traffic will only grow over the long term and a lot of those visitors will at least install devuan to try it out.  Some will like it, some won't.  Some of those people that do like it and keep using it will also contribute code.  The same is true for users of projects based on Devuan.  That will lead to more users which will lead to more code which will lead to more users...and so on.  And that is the momentum I spoke of in my first post.

lazlo

Then devuan became stable and got my attention, although for some reason I had an older image and never got around in trying it.  Manjaro makes alot of noise
and claiming many things that they have yet to deliver.  Apart of systemd their claim of being friendly to init systems is small communities of users just trying to make it work.  Their prime system is systemd, but it is rock solid.    Linus signs something and 2 weeks later it shows up on testing and it works just like the one from two weeks before.  But OpenRC/sysvinit is still a project for development.  You can get it to work but you never know whether the next update will give you
functional system.  5 people on the forum is all the support you may ever get.

Now the systemd gangsters are thinking that by the time it will be revealed what is what it will be too late, as 90% of servers and users will be "customers" without a choice.  So this is worth any discomfort of fixing stuff like a holly war against the rich and poweful.    Can anyone verify that a sealed copy of systemd is not part of windows already?   Money interests can get many bad choices be very effective.

If you know too much you don't need a distro, you can build a system on your own.

If you know enough, you can ... sure ... but then you definitely do know why not to build an own distribution too... :-P

I'm on Debian since the mid90s and up to Debian6 it was near to boringly smooth... ;-) ...so I had the time to play with other stuff too. Then Wheezy made things worse and Jessie got a bit better again, but nothing beats my time with Debian6... even Evolution was stable those days! ***sigh!***

I tried Ubuntu when it was very young and morphing a Debian to Ubuntu was like a version upgrade (luckily it worked back to Debian the same way too :-P). Later, when I got my 1st notebook and I was told Ubuntu would  work better with "such modern stuff", I tried it again. Those were 6hrs of torture and then the notebook got Lenny (was "testing" at that time) and all was good again.

I think Ubuntu's small differences to Debian were worse for me than having a totally different pet (like BSD) under my fingers...

And now here we are... and systemd has to stay outside... \o/

I would have never left debian, despite of systemd, if I thought the philosophy was the guide and not
personal and economic interests that guided decisions.  Based on the commitment to such a philosophy
I currently think that if there is a future this is it.  But markets do not work on facts and people are like
bees on syrup.  So clicking on distrowatch is a way of telling the easily trapped that there is something
good here, better take a look.  Otherwise they will be lost in slumbundu-land.  I have never installed
mint or ubuntu, not because they are bad, but because that is what this market sells.  But I have tried
loads of crappy suspicious stuff that are on the bottom of the list, which is too bad.

"no source no god" 2700 years ago (I think that is how long it was) someone explained that if there
is such a thing as god logic must surely have preceded his existence, so if he exists he must have
incorporated logic.  Heraclitus

Probably not the ones having found what they need.

Who remains?

Fanboyz pushing the clickscount of their favorite toys and visitors really looking for information.
Probably more fanboyz than really curious ones...

So why should I waste a brain minute for thinking about Distrowatch?

Oooops!
Hereby I did...
Shit happens!

Won't do it again, mom!
I promise!

So much for indexing and rating scales marketing people devise.

Devuan 2 the final release

As of today Devuan is ranked:

61 over the past 12 months
42 over the past 6 month
22 over the past 3 months
43 over the past 30 days
40 over the past 7 days

The trend so far is that Devuan gets small bumps in popularity every time there is news story about a security whole or stability flaw that gets marked as "won't fix" on the systemd bug tracker.  Devuan has naturally gotten large bumps in popularity when it has announced any form of "point release" or when a large project announces that it will be built from or based on Devuan. 

The "point releases" have stopped since 1.0 was announced and the number of businesses and distros building on top of Devuan is not large yet.  In my opinion both of these will start contributing a lot more when a beta of ascii is formally announced.

EDIT:  Oh, and on the 6 month list (which is the default list view) Devuan is more popular than Kubuntu, Ubuntu Gnome, Red hat, or Alpine Linux.  It is right below Gentoo which at this time is Number 41 on the list.

lazlo

Nah I was left with a non-functioning system.  The tentacles of Systemd have made their way even further into the debian ecosystem.:(

Debian has a bureaucracy, Devuan is a collective, which makes for a very different way of decision making.

Debian is just as democratic as any western democracy.  It is organized so the public is excluded from the
decision process.  Participation and representation by demagogues and populists is an insult to the ideal of democracy.

You, the OP, are judging future as a dynamic process having a static picture.  Your premise is that debian due to
the high current number of developers will continue developing a good solid system.  This is a "if ... " loop you are
trapped under.  "If" Debian took the wrong turn a while back due to a bad "political decision" influenced by
market and not solid scientific reasoning, Debian will run aground in uncharted waters.  So If and "if not else" is
very significant in analyzing your question.  Look up here and elsewhere postgres and uncontrollable logging
and tell me why so many developers not only can not fix will not even accept this is a bug causing problems
to servers (as a user I can't tell this is a problem).  19log entries a minute without the possibility to stop them
is a problem for any server that does not just deletes all logs in equal rates.

In any way you look at it, it is a bet.  I am betting due to the political decision and philosophy of Devuan.
I have been twice in life abandoned a love relationship, still in love, because of problems of cohabitation.
This is how I feel about debian.  I loved it and still wish I could live with it, but I'd rather not.  I think Manjaro
with OpenRC was a rebound relationship, I'd like to make a family with Devuan now.

Live long and prosper my friends.

Support, as in security updates, will probably end fairly soon, but when you think about it, 64bit systems have been with us for a while now.
Arm processors are getting more prevalent too, so we might see a shift away from 'Intel' archetechture in the near future.
After all, we don't see many 8086 or 8088 based machines around nowadays.

I believe the answer is yes it can survive and even flourish as there is Refracta team as well to feed back to Devuan.  Basically Devuan works better on my machine than Debian so long live Devuan.:)

me too, rock better, but we talk about the future, not the present!

you are totally wrong, Devuan are still based on Debian work.. so the freedom are based on the Debian complication and Devuan availibility of comunity effors.. so if "there's no time" and/or "there's no money" .. the future are black..

as example: xorg soon will drop support complety to older chips.. i have many machines WORKING with matrox, ati and voodo chips.. so due DRI and KMS modern linuxes will not work anymore.. my tv-capture cards also never will go back due that

we all can dream.... make it really its a hard processs

currently Debian dropped support for all 586/486 hardware.. i have some of that machines configured as firewalls.. so then of course Devuan as Debian "copy" (no? its not and make proxy of the packages?) also will drop support for 486/586.... so ill let Devuan..

if we think that nobody today uses older hardware.. we are totally wrong.. users with newer hardware will not complicated if systemd are or not in their OS's.. their have powered machine.. only install and use it!

If I may pose an honest question which I think is relevant to this topic, how much of all the good package compatibility work will find/has found its way back into the source from which Debian repos are built, so that a straight Debian + sysvinit setup will be Devuan in all but name?
I think this issue must eventually work its way through into whether Debian backtracks and effectively offers a clean sysvinit (ie systemd dependency-free) install option which draws in all the Devuan goodness, in which case the fork would have done its job and could be gracefully re-merged. Or is that a) an ideal that can never in reality happen or even b) anything but ideal?

Debian has a bureaucracy, Devuan is a collective, which makes for a very different way of decision making.

Even if Debian were to go back to another init system, why would you give up on a team that understood the problem they, Debian, created & gave us a 'free' system choice?

No, I don't think Devuan will merge back into Debian. Devuan will grow stronger & become a major player in the base distro area.

Edit: Devuan developers are listening to what its users want.