why i use devuan

figdev · 2018-05-24 01:22:44

with regards to devuan-- i am a number of things.

i have used devuan since the first unofficial iso was released in early 2015-- some have used devuan from debootstrap, not me.

i have donated money to devuan.

i have met one member of the devuan team in person.

and, until jessie started behaving strangely on the one machine i wasnt using wheezy on instead, i was promoting debian by running a small debian computer lab and giving debian away.

what i used debian for until systemd was foisted on us is directly related to why i use devuan now.

a few years ago, i was maintaining a small number of computers in a homeless shelter. it started when their main downstairs office machine was too slow. their needs were mostly web-related; i offered to install wheezy and the girl that worked there came out after she first used it and said:

"i cant get it to work!"
"its too ugly!"
"where is microsoft office?"

she said none of things-- she said "its so much faster!" no one ever said they were unhappy-- the machine was crawling before the upgrade.

later i put together a few desktops for people in the shelter to do job searches on. it also made it easier for them to communicate with family and friends. these machines ran wheezy, i remember one person complained it wouldnt run games. i informed the shelter i could install flash-- they were not interested.

this was the "standard" debian wheezy hybrid with lxde-- nothing special. i added a script to /etc/rc.local to automatically shut down a little while after the centre closed, so no one had to go around and do that.

the other thing i did was collect laptops and desktops people didnt want, and clean them up and install debian.

in my own experience, people who have them laying around dont want them fixed-- they have new ones. they dont care what you can install-- they just want to get rid of them, and it helps if theres a cause.

people who have messed up windows machines and no replacement yet will sometimes take an extra laptop if it works better. "here, you can use this." this covers pretty much every demographic except very rich people, ive had mixed luck there.

believe it or not, i recognised systemd pretty early on as something i didnt want to saddle people with. debian+systemd i refused to promote. so i stopped collecting free laptops and giving them away (for a while) and started looking into what could be done about this problem.

that was 2014, and it wasnt until 2015 that i had a solution-- switch to devuan.

around the time i dist-upgraded my main machine to devuan and also installed it on a second partition, i was working on a side-project related to education. i had spent months outlining a class on refurbishing computers with debian that i was now scrapping, so a code-related education project was alluring. i didnt have very big plans for this, because its bigger than anything ive coded before. thus im very proud of it, and you know whats it called, dont you?

i thought early on, the devuan team would love to know i was writing the first programming language in devuan. i was happy with this. i knew the team was busy but i did hope to get in touch with them and let them know. i suppose one devuan developer-- fsmithred-- is fully aware of what i do with fig, though at the time we met he was not in charge of devuan-live; there was no devuan-live yet.

i did use gnuinos and i was pretty happy with it.

as far as i know-- gnuinos is devuan, and refracta is just as much devuan as gnuinos is. devuan encourages remixes-- and it should! encouraging remixes is one way to make your distro larger and more relevant (and if only indirectly-- better designed.)

again, i was happy with gnuinos and im very happy with refracta-- they lend credence to the idea that devuan is suitable for remixing.

i also try a lot of distros out for reference and compatibility-- including devuan 2.0-- it looks good but one of the reasons i prefer refracta is i prefer the installer. refracta also includes fig, which i tried to get into devuan first but couldnt find a way (i had never used git when i first started using devuan.)

but obviously all the stuff ive worked on in the past few years works great with devuan in-some-form, it works great with devuan the official/original, and it was developed in devuan!

ive been told in private by more than one person that some people think im trying to hurt devuan.

you may think i have a motive to do so, but i think thats a ridiculous misunderstanding. i dont want to "hurt devuan" any more than jaromil wanted to "hurt debian." like everyone with a moral compass, i try to stand up for whats right-- and youll find me doing that closer to the things i care about most.

that would even include debian... if i thought it had a chance.

but it certainly includes devuan, because no matter what im griping about, devuan started by discussing the problem and then looking for solutions.

ive done all of that-- and now, like devuan, i now get to regularly defend my own solutions against... misunderstandings.

i have taken both sides in that debate-- as a defender of devuan, and a critic.

three years now with devuan instead of debian, and maybe very soon other people besides the devuan-live maintainer will know what im doing and why!

im quite happy to explain it, it just goes very badly when people try to speak for me.

give it time.

edit: per miyos thread i have just now heard of (and installed) this "neofetch" program.

it gives more information than im interested in sharing, but the parts that arent covered are unedited on my "non-devuan" (this sure looks like devuan) distro:

Last edited by figdev (2018-05-24 04:20:05)

ChuangTzu · 2018-06-21 19:55:03

Very nice post and you should be commended for your efforts with the homeless shelter!

dxrobertson · 2018-06-22 00:36:00

Agree with ChuangTze, your work in homeless shelter is commendable. Very good you made use of linux as the platform.

Please excuse my ignorance, but I do not understand what "fig" is?

golinux · 2018-06-22 05:08:52

@ername . . . your post has been moved to here:
https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?pid=10304#p10304

The officially official Devuan Forum!

#1 2018-05-24 01:22:44

why i use devuan

#2 2018-06-21 19:55:03

Re: why i use devuan

#3 2018-06-22 00:36:00

Re: why i use devuan

#4 2018-06-22 05:08:52

Re: why i use devuan

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