Watch Your First Step!

Devuan was born out of a controversy over the decision to use systemd as the default init system for Debian. The official Debian position on systemd is full of claims that others have debunked.

Init Freedom

While Debian claims that “Systemd is becoming the de facto standard init system for Linux”, a number of GNU/Linux distributions, some new, beg to differ. While Debian claims that “It is better than existing alternatives for all of Debian’s current use cases”, these rebel GNU/Linux distributions refuse this one-size-fits-all vision of the *nix world that breaks portability, ignores backwards compatibility, and replaces existing services, forcing systemd into adoption.

Init Freedom is about restoring a sane approach to PID1, one that respects diversity and freedom of choice.

Although it’s true the venerable sysvinit has flaws that should be addressed in some way, systemd supporters wrongly claim that “systemd is overwhelmingly better than any existing alternative anywhere the technical architecture is involved.” The Init Freedom (IF) Campaign is here to disprove that claim.

Alternate Init Systems

The following init systems are considered for inclusion in Devuan:

• sinit
• openrc
• runit
• s6
• shepherd

Each of them is a portable, compatible, small, fast, and secure alternative to systemd. None of them was considered by Debian as a replacement for sysvinit: instead they chose between systemd, sysvinit, and upstart, leaving the best options, in our opinion, off the table.

GNU/Linux Distributions without systemd

• Devuan uses sysvinit, offers openrc, runit, sinit
• Dragora uses sysvinit + perp
• Gentoo uses openrc (see Gentoo without systemd)
• Obarun uses s6 supervision suite
• PCLinuxOS
• Refracta
• Slackware uses sysvinit
• Stali, the static Linux, uses sinit
• Void Linux uses runit

Systems with systemd by default

• On ArchLinux, you can install openrc instead (see systemd-free for options)
• Parabola GNU/Linux also offers openrc as an alternative init.

Other Free Unices Without systemd

One of the critical reasons against systemd concerns the lack of portability to other Unices, and the associated risk to see Linux-based systems detach from the UNIX world. OpenBSD, FreeBSD and other BSD OSes are de facto incompatible with systemd, or rather, systemd is incompatible with Unices not running Linux.

• The BSD family:
  • FreeBSD
  • OpenBSD
  • DragonFly BSD
  • etc.

Alternate Device Managers

Now that udev is an integral part of systemd, running a device manager without it became impossible. Just kidding: you can run the following:

• Gentoo’s eudev is a fork of udev to remove systemd dependency and make it run with an existing environment (including, existing properly running scripts deemed outdated by systemd and therefore assimilated—like: digested, some parts are missing).
• mdev, the device manager of BusyBox.
• Jude Nelson’s vdev (WIP) is expected to replace udev in Devuan.