This thread made me sad. Luckily, it seems Franko gets it.

I too am somewhat an old hand. Not as prolific and famous as ESR, but involved in development of several distros in the late 90s. And some of the comments here made me a bit worried. I think they missed the point.

Getting bigger that Ubuntu or whatever other random distro is not a good goal in itself. Let just not waste time on discussing it, its a strawman. What IS important is to create a viable distro that will be around in 10 years. Being around requires having developers, and continuing to have new ones (as old ones will inevitably leave). This requires having users. Getting users means making things work logically/intuitively (i on purpose do not put the word "easy" here. Reading manuals is fine. But a few points ESR made a fair enough).

And, surprisingly perhaps, the desktop IS important. See Linus recent rant on why ARM has problems making it in the server market? People are used to have x86 desktops. They develop on that, so they don't want to make life complicated by having a different arch on the server. It is likely a big reason why MS got any influence on the server market at all. And I know it is why e.g. Redhat spends time desktop things. You will need good people to help, but for that you will need to invest in attracting users.

A big threat I see to Devuan is that large subsystems become so dependent on systemd that it takes a lot of work to remove such dependencies. This can happen because there are so few big systemd free distros. So I would not care at all about beating distro X, but I would care to be a viable alternative that makes upstream think twice about what to support.

I personally feel (but this is something that would be good that the core team needs to figure out), that being a viable alternative to debian (which includes both desktop, sever, perhaps some embedded use. And includes experts but also users willing to learn) is a very nice thing to strive for. This is why I recently installed it, and so far I like it (and my use cases are home, business laptop, and high-performance computing, and i tend to prefer KDE these days). I updated to beowulf though because ASCII was simply too old for my needs.  I had to put it a bit more work to fix several annoying problems (which i will not go into here, but point is that they were fixable because the whole thing seemed to be designed well, and that is exactly what I expected of this distro).

A final note: Being a distro based on "no systemd" is not enough to live. Several distros seem to make their hatred of systemd define their existence. It is a trap. Such traps were also common 20 years ago. And I feel it is a waste of energy, and the emotion finally runs out (and the users that came to you just because of the word "systemd" eventually give up and leave). It seems better to focus on making a better distro. I am (and I am sure you are as well) convinced this needs to be done without systemd, as it is badly designed software, but that is the reason you build your distro without it. Not merely because it is named systemd or because systemd is the only software that is bad. If tomorrow systemd turns into good software I happily use it.