The officially official Devuan Forum!

lazlo

Member

From: the Top Left of the Noosphere

Registered: 2017-05-15

Posts: 31  

Re: Can Devuan survive and face the development of Debian?

If a system has no bugs, no requests to change or improve anything, the perfect system, it will rank 200 in the distrowatch list.  It would be considered a dead
project and abandoned.  A good system in their logic is one that has too many bugs and every little step on clearing out 1% of them is a point release.

So much for indexing and rating scales marketing people devise.

Devuan 2 the final release

I think that I didn't explain the ratings system well enough.  A Distrowatch rating is based on the number of unique IP addresses visiting a vendor's website each day.  These numbers are averaged for each of the selected time frames, so that (as of this post) www.devuan.org has averaged 251 unique IP address visits a day over the past 6 months.  The reason there is a correlation between news articles/point releases/press releases and the Distrowatch rating is a bit obvious once it is explained, but if you don't read the "fine print" on distowatch.com my last post may be taken in the wrong way. 

For example let's look at Gentoo.  They very rarely announce anything in the press and they have rolling release style so it's extremely rare for them announce a new version.  On the other hand, anyone who uses Gentoo knows how important their forums and wiki are to keeping a system running smoothly.  So they get a lot of traffic without press releases and news articles being writen about them. 

Next look at the number 1 ranked distro, Mint.  I could use Mint blindfolded and with one arm tied behind my back.  Someone new to linux who has been told "Start with Mint, explore from there" will need to be looking up all sorts of stuff.  Since Mint is Ubuntu based, Ubuntu also gets some of Mint's traffic to their website (i.e. visits to wiki.ubuntu.com) as well as all of their own traffic.  Even Debian gets some traffic from Mint and Ubuntu users looking up information on wiki.debian.org and that's in addition to all of the Debian specific traffic. 

So my point is really that while Devuan may never be ranked number 1 on distrowatch.com it already has as much daily traffic to it's main site as Gentoo does on theirs.  Devuan's web traffic will only grow over the long term and a lot of those visitors will at least install devuan to try it out.  Some will like it, some won't.  Some of those people that do like it and keep using it will also contribute code.  The same is true for users of projects based on Devuan.  That will lead to more users which will lead to more code which will lead to more users...and so on.  And that is the momentum I spoke of in my first post.

lazlo

Last edited by lazlo (2017-07-20 05:24:27)

LambOfNothing

Member

Registered: 2017-10-08

Posts: 7  

Re: Can Devuan survive and face the development of Debian?

Hello,

Since there are more people developing Debian, does it leave some chances to survive to Devuan. The idea / concept of Devuan is really cool, but what about it s future.

Bugs reporting but also fixing them are important issues.

Thank you

The success and development of one distribution isn't going to cripple the success of another distribution based on it with entirely different political and development goals. Devuan made the best choice they could in utilizing Debian as a base, which means that they can "leech" the user-base that used Debian, but wanted a more free and security-based distribution on the whole - they could then switch to Devuan. Personally for me, this was the case entirely. Debian seems more concerned with appealing to the general audience, often opting to bloat the distribution more than I need in order to appeal to a broader range of users, which isn't necessarily a bad move (if you don't mind double-backing on the more "ethical" approach to security or one's technical autonomy), it just cuts against some of my interests and desires. If there's a supply and there's a demand, there's little room for the failing of any project driven almost entirely by incentive and ethics.

The Dyne team are heavy-hitters and don't strike me at all as the type of people who build things that they aren't going to see through. They've literally churned out more creditable security-based projects than anyone out there, and every single project is highly regarded and respected in the various pools of individuals that float around in the multitude of privacy and opsec-related hubs. No one's a psychic, but I really don't see why anyone would have doubts about the legitimacy of a project like this. The world being as fucked as it is when it comes to the security and technical spaces almost guarantees Devuan's relevance; developers behind Devuan almost guarantee its excellence.

Last edited by LambOfNothing (2017-10-08 12:40:16)

mckaygerhard

Member

Registered: 2017-04-21

Posts: 283  

Website

Re: Can Devuan survive and face the development of Debian?

now some months was passed and time go forward

taking in consideration that devuan "its just a debian without systemd" (well made merge and proxy of their repositories)

debian strech was released and then ascii need to be release soon, so the original question its a constant reallity