While here in “self isolation” I’ve been messing with the new Beta of Devuan 3 (Beowulf). I think this is I think (finally) based on the current Debian Buster (Stable) rather than Devuan 2/2.1 (ASCII) which is/was based on Debian Stretch. (Devuan codenames are based on asteroids or something (Minor Planet Center Names List), so there’s an ASCII asteroid out there - cool).
The thing about Devuan is the don’t use systemd but offer SysVinit or OpenRC alternative (so really it’s for those allergic to systemd).
I had Devuan 2/2.1 on one of my laptops (the HP Elitebook 8470p I think) for quite a white and it worked as well as most other Linux distros for me. I had Xfce as my DE (of course) and really only got rid of it because
- I wanted the space to try something else
- It was getting a bit too far behind being based on Debian Stretch in a Buster world
Anyway, Beowulf has been looking good, I’ve not installed it on hardware (yet), just been using the Live CD and it’s hanging in there. True I haven’t install all my usual default applications, but as those work fine on Debian Buster, MX-19, and SolydXK I don’t see why they won’t on Beowulf.
Personally I’m not considering changing to Devuan, MX-19 is doing me just fine but I probably will stick on some hardware (maybe that HP Elitebook again replacing the Xubuntu 20.04 that’s on it). I just thought I’d mention the new Devuan beta release in case anyone was looking for a non systemd distro.
Download from https://files.devuan.org/
Now, where is that old Elitebook… it’s in this pile somewhere