The Devuan project (Debian without systemd) has released version 5.0

Many people were dismayed at the Debian project's decision to switch, as of Debian 8 "Jessie", entirely to systemd as a process manager, instead of offering a choice between SysVinit (the previous, up to Debian 7 "Wheezy", startup manager) and systemd (the ever-growing code which seems hell-bent on taking over everything on a Linux system between the kernel and the applications).

It was therefore good to see the announcement of the Devuan project, as a fork of Debian, to maintain parallel releases, but without systemd (continuing to use SysVinit instead).

In some ways this is a simple idea - the vast majority of applications on your machine don't care what the init system is, just so long as there is one, and it's only the bits which handle system startup and shutdown, and process startup and shutdown, which Devuan needs to keep track of.

However, thanks to systemd's ever-increasing scope-creep, whereby it replaces all sort of parts of your system which you hadn't expected from init() (such as DNS resolution, network device naming, and system logging to name only a few), the Devuan project has had to take over quite a good amount of code and keep it up to date, whilst maintaining the application interfaces expected by the rest of the Debian distribution.

All in all, congratulations to the Devuan project team for releasing 5.0 "Daedalus", based on Debian 12 "Bookworm", and for making the upgrade process from Debian to Devuan (either between equivalent releases, or including a release upgrade at the same time) extremely simple - it's as easy as upgrading a Debian system from one release to the next. Devuan versions after "Jessie" are named alphabetically after minor planets.

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