Centralization is bad.

Also, since we've been getting GNU/Linux Mint refugees (myself included), this can influence Devuan's development as there will be more potential beta testers, packagers, and forum regulars who can share their wealth of knowledge. I like it better that way than going big with corporate sponsorships (e.g. Red Hat, Canonical, Microsoft, Intel, HP).

Debian is without a doubt a distro. Technically speaking, GNU is the operating system that nearly all of the distros are produced from. We just call it "Linux" because it's more conventional, despite it fundamentally being nothing more than a kernel.

Fair enough. I actually tested Siduction on a virtual machine and carefully changed the repositories over to Devuan. There were too many sticky spots when trying to remove Systemd and install Runit or a different init, as their exclusive repositories were still dependent on Systemd to some extent.

I can also see your point that simply removing or installing packages won't cut it. Configuration files have a lot to do with how a system operates.

Funny enough, all my Devuan Ceres systems have specific PPAs (for packages not found in the official repositories, such as Otter Browser and Strawberry) and run just fine. A few hiccups at first, but applying the fixes panned things out. i wouldn't say this is a "FrankenDevuan", as I'm only using the development branches in my repositories. It would've been the case for mixing stable with unstable (or maybe even backports).

Even so, no reason for me to stop using Devuan. You can't always trust Debian today with their upstream decisions, because you know they're going to fuck something up tomorrow. They're still too heavily influenced by Red Hat, Canonical, and GNOME garbage, and direct pushers of Wayland. Just because you can change your init this time around doesn't mean they're not corrupt anymore. It's a deception.

Devuan is more than just another "Systemd protest" distro. It actually aims for KISS philosophy as much as possible without the pretentious "minimalism" crap. It's everything that Debian should have been for the longest time. The fact that a fork had this much influence says a lot.

Shit like this is why I stopped coming back.

Sync problems sometimes happen. I recommend retrying a few more times. I usually succeed after the second or third attempt. Also, Ceres is VERY stable on my machines, and I have not returned to Beowulf or Chimaera ever since. The few instances of breakage I've experienced have been mild at worst. You just have to use common sense.

I think when it comes to the anti-Systemd crowd, most tend to gravitate towards Artix GNU/Linux or any other non-LTS distro. Devuan still serves a purpose for Debian and Ubuntu refugees, but I can see why some people aren't too fond of APT and its tendency to break dependencies, when Pacman can work around that sort of thing.

As long as Debian continues to make retarded decisions "on behalf" of its users, people will continue to recommend Devuan and just about every other downstream distro that won't put up with their nonsense.

I have Devuan installed on a very old laptop from the Pentium M era. Works smoothly for its age, and it's been all over the place.

It's likely your systems don't need any updates for Beowulf right this moment. You could try adding beowulf-proposed-updates and/or beowulf-backports to your repositories and see what updates are readily available. It's the safer alternative to pulling in packages from Chimaera or Ceres.

I think Debian's problems are more than just "embracing" Systemd. The current operations aren't as "traditional-minded" as once in the past. Speaking highly of things such as Wayland, GNOME, and other modern atrocities to GNU/Linux would entail that what passes off for "Debian" is primarily by influence of Red Hat and Canonical.

Some of us like to live on the edge...

Golinux's post should set the record straight.

I think you're looking around for things that clearly don't exist. Devuan forks over two hundred Debian packages to remove Systemd parts, and whichever ones make it difficult to do so would end up being blacklisted for everyone's safety. It's not a perfect world, but this is as good as it's going to get.

You're more than welcome to help out the developers with bug testing, package maintenance, and so on. I find those would be a lot more constructive to the cause than making these sorts of threads.