Devuan, the fork of Debian GNU/Linux, has announced the release of its latest distribution, Devuan 5.0 “Daedalus” (source). This new version is significant as it transitions to the Debian 12 Bullseye package base. The distribution is provided without the Systemd system manager. ISO images for various architectures, including i386, AMD64, ARMHF, ARM64, and ppc64el, can be downloaded here (source).
Devuan has made modifications to approximately 400 Debian packages to remove dependencies on Systemd and adapted them to support the features of the Devuan infrastructure. Additional packages specific to Devuan can be found in the Devuan repository (source). Devuan is fully compatible with Debian and can serve as a foundation for creating specialized Debian assemblies without Systemd (source).
The default desktop environment of Devuan 5.0 “Daedalus” is based on XFCE and the SLIM display manager. However, users have the option to install other desktop environments such as KDE, Mate, Cinnamon, LXQT, and LXDE. Instead of Systemd, Devuan uses the traditional Sysvinit as its initialization system. Additionally, users can choose to use alternative systems like OpenRC and Runit. Devuan also supports working without d-bus, enabling the creation of minimalistic configurations for window managers like Blackbox, Fluxbox, FVWM, FVWM-Crystal, and Openbox. Network configuration is handled by a non-Systemd NetworkManager configurator. For user session management, XFCE and MATE use Consolekit, while the other desktop environments utilize ELOGIND, the Logind option not tied to Systemd (source).
Devuan 5 brings several changes and new features, including:
- The transition to the Debian 12 package base, synchronized with Debian 12.1, and the Linux 6.1