Thank you Devuan

nixer · 2024-10-06 14:42:42

Sometimes you run across something that really does open your eyes and makes you appreciate what you have - for example, Devuan.

Yesterday I ran across a mailing list post from 2010 from Lennert Pottering. It really opened my eyes regarding his consideration of linux and his purpose for systemd. I now have a better understanding why non-systemd systems were created and do still exist. I really do not want to fan the flames of fire towards systemd. Everyone reading this has probably already read enough about this. It is well documented and preserved. However, this entire post is short and I did extract the worst of it, but I added nothing. It is what it is.

I really have to wonder why and what is the purpose of such benevolence towards others and their creations?

Coersion ?

...it is definitely our intention to gently push the distributions in the same direction so that they stop supporting deviating solutions ...

Consideration?

... our plan is to enable all this by default ... we want to put the burden on the packagers, so that eventually we end up with the same base system on all distributions, ...

Conquering?

If a distro decides ... then it's their own job to disable ours and plug in their own instead. Sooner or later they'll hopefully notice that it's not worth it and cross-distro unification is worth more.

I have a new appreciation on what Devuan is and what it stands for.

I have been using Devuan since before it even had an installer. In the earliest days it has a bootstrap method of "installation" which, while not elegant, it worked.

To those that create and develop Devuan, congratulations on being available to the public for over 10 years now. My heartfelt "thank you" goes out to everyone who has worked to make it what it is today.

The entire post is found at https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/ … 00391.html

Last edited by nixer (2024-10-06 19:01:02)

golinux · 2024-10-06 15:12:37

WOW! You are quite an archeologist, nixer!! So openly brazen!! How was this post not found nearly 15 years ago?

Camtaf · 2024-10-06 16:48:03

Regarding distros being forced to follow their path, Linux might have to eventually, but people who know what they are doing will just gravitate to the BSDs.

Thankfully, Linux hasn't been corrupted beyond redemption just yet though.....

golinux · 2024-10-06 16:54:05

It is a good time to be old . . . very old . . .

stargate-sg1-cheyenne-mtn · 2024-10-06 18:13:18

indeed

yeti · 2024-10-07 06:56:06

golinux wrote:

WOW! You are quite an archeologist, nixer!! So openly brazen!! How was this post not found nearly 15 years ago?

Did we need to find that to smell these motives?
Big-$$$ wants the single flavour steamlined Linux base to make their lives easier.
But sure it is nice to being able to point to it as evidence.

Linux turns into what it aimed to be an alternative to, and we are like the slowly boiled frogs in that game. Devuan buys us some time, but we will lose unless we find other kernels. Some projects with Linux compatible kernels are already there, but they need more time.

And there are the BSDs. You remember the pages of debian.org mentioning Debian ports to the 3 major BSD kernels? That silently died for 2½ of them. Only Debian/kFreebsd kind of still exists.

golinux wrote:

It is a good time to be old . . . very old . . .

Only already mad souls dream of immortality in the world we now face.

blackhole · 2024-10-07 13:42:10

I remember all that, at the time. The plan was always to coerce and force systemd adoption. Many of us argued about this at the time, but were shouted down and categorised as "tin foil hat" wearers, by the noisy parrots who drank the Red Hat kewl aid..

If something is well designed and works well, there's no need to coerce or force, or weave it in as a dependency.

If something is badly designed, but they want to establish it as the de facto standard, then that's where you find the coercion and weaving in and forced dependencies. It's a corporate tactic - it's why many "need" MS Windows, or an MS account or a google account or social networking membership, etc. The bad, profit driven, things are always loaded with coercion, security theatre, scare mongering, marketing, etc - and sadly they fall for it over and over again.

UEFI is bad - you got it, because a consortium of US based Big Tech corporations made sure you got it, because it's in their interests (especially Microsoft's), not yours, theirs.

"Microsoft loves Linux" is akin to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_ … ight_Zone)

And now the chief architect of systemd works for that number one enemy of FOSS and Linux.

Eventually Devuan will need a new base. I would guess that it will need a new base Linux distribution much sooner than it will need a new kernel. Debian project is toxic, it takes Microsoft money and cannot be trusted as a base, or for anything else for that matter. It will serve it's own interests and corporate interests, such as those of Canonical or Microsoft for example.

https://techrights.org/n/2024/06/11/Deb … hat_.shtml

This "rot" goes right through to the Linux kernel itself: https://techrights.org/o/2023/06/20/mic … oundation/

Last edited by blackhole (2024-10-07 13:50:15)

pl · 2024-10-08 07:23:25

And now I've seen everything... While I knew his intentions, I didn't expect he really said it directly, with no shame... He's not just bad. He's a plain sociopath.

blackhole wrote:

Eventually Devuan will need a new base.

IMO it needs such *now*, we see right now where it's going and just discussion 'bout what to rebase on will take pretty much time...
Also if Devuan decided to rebase, I'd avoid rebasing on not-yet-screwed-up distro but go further and already change to *BSD (second largest family of libre OSes), like Hyperbola tries to. While I agree that

blackhole wrote:

it will need a new base Linux distribution much sooner than it will need a new kernel

Linux [as a kernel] is in danger anyway. May be it still okay "technologically", but it may be matter of time when corporate mentality of it's head [Linux "Foundation"] pollutes Linux itself - And Devuan would have to yet again sacrifice time and pain for yet another rebase...
Or shortly, I believe it'd be much sensible to sacrifice a bit more time switching to more reliable platform instead of risking yet another rebase in future

Ze question is however, will it remain Devuan we know? I mean, after that it for sure won't be just "Debian without systemd"
From other side...
- Devuan would free itself from Debian, therefore allowing it's manpower to power innovation instead of fighting with upstream
- It'd be nice to have GNU/BSD which would make as friendlier* [to novices] and unique alternative to "pure" *BSDs

Just me 2 cents and a suggestion what can we do.

*I'm in camp that perceives BSD userland superior to GNU regarding size and efficiency, however I'm closer to power user than to "average" user and I see GNU is much friendlier to non-advanced users and therefore would make a very gud addition to BSD world

Last edited by pl (2024-10-08 07:36:47)

quickfur · 2024-10-08 09:42:27

- Devuan would free itself from Debian, therefore allowing it's manpower to power innovation instead of fighting with upstream

This is a misrepresentation of the state of things. While it's true we have to fight with upstream w.r.t. what's related to systemd, without Debian we wouldn't even have a miniscule fraction of manpower to manage the huge package repository that we today inherit from Debian. The devs would be drowning in package maintenance, there would be no resources left for innovation.

pl · 2024-10-08 10:08:53

quickfur wrote:

This is a misrepresentation of the state of things. While it's true we have to fight with upstream w.r.t. what's related to systemd, without Debian we wouldn't even have a miniscule fraction of manpower to manage the huge package repository that we today inherit from Debian. The devs would be drowning in package maintenance, there would be no resources left for innovation.

Okay, that's good point...

yeti · 2024-10-08 11:01:56

There is no solution with Linux. We need to get used to this thought.

Altoid · 2024-10-08 12:25:58

Hello:

quickfur wrote:

... wouldn't even have a miniscule fraction of manpower ...
... devs would be drowning ...

Quite so.
And then, Devuan would be toast.

Debian (fundamentally, the ecosystem* behind it) knows this because it is, for the most part, the path / timeline they have traced from the start.
Eventually, Debian (at least as we know it today) will also cease to exist and be replaced with whatever it is they eventually come up with.
* MS, RH, IBM, Alphabet, etc.

The next step, already in motion, is this cross-distro unification idea.
And when that has become the norm, the question they will be asking will be "why do we have so many distributions?", the answer being quite obvious:

Why not have just The One OS for everyone, much easier to maintain.
And control.

Imagine, even a simple AI will be able to do it. 8^°

It is not a prophesy or any such thing, the writing has been on the wall for the longest time.
Way before Poettering's 2010 screed.

Best,

A.

quickfur · 2024-10-08 16:09:36

Back in the 90's when the joke that was Windows 95 was still the talk of the kids, I decided to leave that world behind forever. At the time, Linux was a (very) niche OS that nobody has hardly heard a thing about. I reviewed the handful of distros that existed back then, and chose Debian for being the most flexible and convenient: I could leverage the package repo without having to compile everything by hand, yet I could customize the OS as I wished, trimming off unnecessary fat and installing only the bare minimum of what I needed, nothing more, nothing less.

Back then, I couldn't care less that nobody among my peers used Linux, or even knew what Linux was (except that one friend who recommended it to me at first). Whenever I mentioned that I used Linux, I would get incredulous stares and blank looks. Did I care? Of course not. The Debian of the 90's gave me the best balance between convenience and control, and I could finally be free of the tyranny that is the Windows ecosystem. I didn't care that I had to leave behind a lot of popular software that the kids loved to boast about. What I cared for is that finally, I had control over my own machine. And as a then-aspiring programmer, that's all I cared about. Who cares about the eye-candy that Win'95 offered? It was a joke that I couldn't care less about. Linux let me dig under the hood and modify things to my heart's content. I, the user, was empowered. That was what mattered.

Sadly, the Debian of 2024 is a very different world. The hacker mentality of the 90's had long gone. People cared more for winning the approval of the masses than for what truly mattered: the empowerment of the user. In place of that is the empowerment of the upstream. Folks like the systemd guys wanted to control everything. The proprietary mentality has infiltrated what was once an open mentality. (Ironically, it seems that in history, every time the word "open" became part of a project's name, the project became closed and controlled by the few rather than the many.) In their efforts to please the masses, they are ready to compromise on anything and everything. Who cares about the Unix philosophy of doing one thing, and doing it well? "That results in something that's different from Windows!" is the underlying message. "We must unify everything so that it ~~becomes more like Windows~~is more intuitive to the user!" IOW, they wanted to bring Linux back to the very world I had decisively left in the 90's and never want to return to.

And so I found Devuan and left the systemd world behind. Hardly anybody has heard of Devuan in my social circles, let alone know what it is. Do I care? Of course not. At this point, I'm ready to leave it all behind to adopt an unknown niche OS -- if it cares about the empowerment of the user rather than the empowerment of the upstream. I don't care if nobody has heard about it or even knows what it is. I don't care about systemd, snap, cross-distro unification, or any such similar nonsense that has been hoisted on the Linux world in the past 2 decades. If I have to give up 80% of popular software, so be it. I did it in the 90's, I'm ready to do it again.

And I believe I'm not the only one. Let the majority of today's so-called Linux crowd go the way of Poettering, I'm sure a minority will reject it and take a different route. We will fork the Linux ecosystem and leave the unified world behind. ("Unified world" is an euphemism for "dystopia under the control of a few who took it upon themselves to control everyone else".) We will develop it in a wholly different direction, where the empowerment of the user matters more than the agenda of the few. The machine should be humanity's tool, not the other way round. To hell with popularity, I will fight for my control over the machine.

stargate-sg1-cheyenne-mtn · 2024-10-08 16:17:15

Eric S. Raymond commentary from a few years back but still right on point:

slashdot snippet:
https://linux.slashdot.org/story/20/09/27/193250/eric-s-raymond-is-microsoft-switching-to-a-linux-kernel-that-emulates-windows

eric's commentary at his website:
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8764

edited post: added content

another much earlier post regarding "Teen Sex vs. Adult Resentment" as food for thought and introspection:
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=78

Last edited by stargate-sg1-cheyenne-mtn (2024-10-15 06:11:55)

golinux · 2024-10-08 16:35:08

quickfur wrote:

We will fork the Linux ecosystem and leave the unified world behind. ("Unified world" is an euphemism for "dystopia under the control of a few who took it upon themselves to control everyone else".) We will develop it in a wholly different direction, where the empowerment of the user matters more than the agenda of the few.

And who is this mythical "WE" of whom you speak? You have no git account. AFAIK have never been seen on IRC or even the mailing lists, at least as quickfur. And one of our jitsi meets? Hahahaha! What have YOU contributed to Devuan besides an endless stream of wasted bits in OT and empty rousing rhetoric to encourage someone else to do the work for you. Epic fail . . ..

quickfur · 2024-10-08 17:19:15

Wow, by so little and we're already engaging in the ad hominem? Based on unfounded presumptions, no less. That must make you feel real good about yourself. I hope you're happy now.

Since I'm clearly not welcome here, I guess I should just shut up and take my energy elsewhere. Thanks for the tip, and have a nice day!

fanderal · 2024-10-08 18:59:50

This Open letter to the Linux World was posted a few years later, in 2014, around the time of Debian's adoption discussions. It's direct and well written, as others wrote then and since.

"Instead of complaining, do something about it." is something we've all seen occasionally in Linux forums. That it's about open source makes it possible to suggest. However, rewriting specific functions of an existing OS's internal code takes a great deal of time, as well as the continuing commitment to maintain. Yet to take on a project like Devuan when most of the Linux community was moving in a different direction?

I think it's worth repeating...

nixer wrote:

To those that create and develop Devuan, congratulations on being available to the public for over 10 years now. My heartfelt "thank you" goes out to everyone who has worked to make it what it is today.

yeti · 2024-10-08 19:29:37

quickfur wrote:

We will fork the Linux ecosystem and leave the unified world behind.

Linux (the kernel) will adapt increasingly to systemd's existence and forking that monster that soon won't work without systemd at all just would be the next manpower problem and a continuous fight against growing windmills. I only see a future for Linux in the dimension with locked-in users. $THEY won. Linux now is the new Windows, just get used to that.

*RIBBIT!*

golinux · 2024-10-08 19:53:29

@quickfur . . . No, I am disappointed that you choose to shoot the messenger rather than engage Devuan in a meaningful way. If I have missed something, please correct me.

quickfur · 2024-10-08 22:03:49

Shoot the messenger? Whoa, slow down, soldier. I wrote a post explaining why I came to Devuan, which, might I emphasize, did not contain any insults or ad hominem, especially not anything involving you. And your response was, I quote:

You have no git account. AFAIK have never been seen on IRC or even the mailing lists, at least as quickfur. And one of our jitsi meets? Hahahaha! What have YOU contributed to Devuan besides an endless stream of wasted bits in OT and empty rousing rhetoric to encourage someone else to do the work for you. Epic fail . . ..

I guess I must have missed the memo, is this how people welcome each other in 2024? Wow, I'm so outdated on what the new norms are on social etiquette. Is this what they mean by "generation gap"? Guess I should crawl back to my primitive cave and stay there until I learn how to treat another human being with ad hominem and derision as a way of encouraging their contribution. It's certainly a novel idea, I must say. Never thought of it before myself. I guess I have you to thank for this enlightenment.

Now excuse me while I retire to my cave to muse over the deep significance of this "revelation".

golinux · 2024-10-08 22:54:39

@quickfur . . .Yes, and I have just re-read New Devuan user here in which you received a very warm welcome.

In that post you gave some personal history regarding Debian/Devuan and your personal life. You were showered with a warm welcome and plenty of information.

You are very good with words but haven't a clue about the history and interpersonal relationships that it has taken to get Devuan to this point and makes it so special. It has been about love and joy and cooperation.

Seems you might not be a good fit with the ethos here . . .

I do hope that you can learn to deal with your anger more constructively going forward . . .

quickfur · 2024-10-09 00:46:09

Anger? Lol boy do you have a warped view of who I am. This exchange has been quite amusing, in spite of being rather disappointing. Especially amusing (and disappointing) is "love and joy and cooperation" coming from someone who, as anyone can see for themselves above, resorted to ad hominem unprovoked.

But nevermind that. I'm perfectly fine not participating in this, shall I say, "interesting" community where ad hominem is equated with love and joy and cooperation.

I have nothing against you, and hold no grudge, but I hope you can see for yourself what you have just done. Perhaps, just perhaps, there's room for improvement somewhere? Just sayin'.

Anyway, that's quite enough from me. Time to shut up and return to my "cave". Have a nice day!

golinux · 2024-10-09 01:03:53

quickfur wrote:

Lol boy do you have a warped view of who I am.

Ditto . . . and I would be happy to explore that via email . . .

goat · 2024-10-09 06:36:01

More often than not, it's counter-productive to deride users. There is no need to heap scorn upon anyone in this thread so far as I can see; and it's inefficient as well as ineffective towards bringing in new contributors (unless they are a masochist?). Not everyone has had the chance to acquire years of experience in the field, to acquire and make connections; some people are simply passionate about the ideals, dreams, and goals.

Solidification and certainty in one's social circle can be a beneficent thing; but, it is also subject to social entropy, decay, and exclusionary behavior.

On top of that, well written words can be extremely useful, for the pen is mightier than the sword; and that's exactly what programming is, (hopefully) well written words in a specific language that instructs compilers on how to instruct computers, etc.

These are trying times, however. So, perhaps some things get lost in translation, from time to time..

All that aside..

Thanks Devuan!

-goat

Last edited by goat (2024-10-09 06:37:37)

Camtaf · 2024-10-09 09:01:29

Personally, I am very grateful to those who manage to keep Linux as it was meant to be, I'm not a programmer, but I know programming is non trivial.

That is why I try to help in these & other forums, it is my way of giving something back to the community, in a way that I am able.

If it weren't for the likes of AntiX & Devuan, I would have gone over to the BSDs full time a while ago, when systemd arrived on the scene, but thanks to the programmers that though like myself, I am still able to use a familiar O/S.....

Also, if it wasn't for people setting up & maintaining forums such as here, where would we even be able to discuss our preferred O/S, so my thanks also go to our forum maintainers....

The officially official Devuan Forum!

#1 2024-10-06 14:42:42

Thank you Devuan

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Re: Thank you Devuan

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