Devuan
Devuan is a fork of Debian that uses sysvinit, runit or OpenRC instead of systemd. The Devuan development team aim to maintain compatibility with other init systems in the future and not detach Linux from other Unix systems. History. The release of Debian 8 alienated some developers and other users due to the project's adoption of systemd and subsequent removal of support for other existing init systems. The first stable release of Devuan was published on May 25, 2017. Instead of continuing the Debian practice of using Toy Story character names as release codenames, Devuan aliases its releases  using planet names. The first stable release shared the Debian 8 codename "Jessie". However, the Devuan release was named for . The second stable release is named "ASCII" for asteroid/minor planet 3568 and is based on Debian 9 Stretch. The third stable release is named "Beowulf" after and is based on Debian 10 Buster. The fourth release is named Chimaera after minor planet 623 and is based on Debian 11 Bullseye. The permanent alias for the Devuan unstable branch is "Ceres", so named for the dwarf planet. Devuan 2.0.0 "ASCII" was released on June 9, 2018, and 2.1 "ASCII" was  released on November 21, 2019. ASCII provides a choice of five different desktop environments at install time (XFCE, Cinnamon, KDE, LXQt, MATE), while many other window managers are available from the repositories. It also provides installation options for choosing between sysvinit and OpenRC for init, and between GRUB and LILO for the boot loader. Devuan maintains a modified version of the Debian expert text installer, which has the ability to install only free software if the user chooses, while the live desktop image also uses a custom graphical installer from Refracta, a derivative of Devuan. Devuan 3.0 Beowulf was released  on June 3, 2020, based on Debian 10.4. Ppc64el has been added to the list of supported architectures. Runit is now available as an alternative init. Eudev and elogind are now used to replace some Systemd functionality. Devuan 4.0 Chimaera was released October 14, 2021. It is based on Debian Bullseye (11.1) with Linux kernel 5.10. Packages. Devuan has its own package repository which mirrors upstream Debian, with local modifications made only when needed to allow for init systems other than systemd. Modified packages include policykit and udisks. Devuan is supposed to work like the corresponding Debian release. Devuan does  not provide systemd in its repositories but still retains libsystemd0 until it has removed all dependencies. Amprolla is the program used to merge Debian packages with Devuan packages. It downloads packages from Debian and merges changes to packages that Devuan overrides. Version history. Source: