As a long time Debian user and former Linux Mint user, I finally decided to give Devuan a try, as I face the reality of Debian 12's stale package base. I love that there are still distros that care about user choice, even in something as obscure as our choice of init. The fact that I can change file manager, text editor or even my whole DE but I can't choose a different init without the entire system collapsing on itself is kind of wild to me. Alas, I am preaching to the choir.

First impressions of Devuan are very good. I was unsurprised, (yet still disappointed) that 3rd party repos like ProtonVPN are DOA, since it's built with a hard systemd dependency. It could probably be fixed but that's likely a low priority for them. I went ahead with a manual wireguard setup which they have a decent setup guide for and it worked exactly as on Debian. Hopefully Mozilla's repo works but I haven't tried it yet. (I want a current Firefox, but I refuse to use a Flatpak browser.)

I went with Cinnamon, one of my favorite desktops from the amazing Mint team and it mostly seemed ok but the time was broken in the GUI. I couldn't set it, nor enable network time, probably due to using a systemd component. I don't know if the cinnamon package slipped through the cracks or if systemd is so deeply ingrained that patching it is infeasible for the Devuan team. At any rate, I did more or less fix it by manually installing chrony and configuring NTP that way. GUI remains broken but at least displays the right time as long as I have internet. It does fall back to a bad time without a network but that might be a VM issue.

In any case, I'm really enjoying Devuan so far and look forward to finding out all the little ways I was secretly reliant on systemd's bloated mess. As a Debian user, I deeply value privacy and security and I love that Devuan prioritizes user control and transparency on top of that security-first philosophy.