Devuan 3.1 Released - Debian Fork Now Offers Runit Plus Sysvinit, OpenRC

[Terrablit]

I am just a simple Desktop user and I want a distro that is Community driven not a distro that is driven by Red Hat, I wouldn't switch to Devuan if they would decided to have an agnostic approach like Gentoo. I am fine with Devuan and OpenRC, don't have any problem and I don't need to use systemd whatsoever...

This is a pretty common anti-Red Hat line that borders on copypasta, but I'll treat it seriously.

Debian isn't driven by Red Hat. What's more, Red hat is a pretty valuable member of the community, driving significant kernel and userland development. We could get by without them, for sure, but there's no need for it. Corporate needs drive development in the Linux platform. They're a significant factor in Linux being as advanced as it is. What's unfortunate is that corporations spend most of their development funding on things that make them money. Those things tend to be invisible to most desktop users.

Many other corporations don't contribute to linux and the software commons. Those are who we should be more concerned with. Red Hat has needs many desktop users don't. Most of their development on that route is either optional or tunable. We suffer no loss in accepting corporate contributions that meet project standards and remain open.

If you have a problem with nearly half of Linux development being funded by corporate contributions, the correct solution is to contribute and donate more to eclipse their donations. Not demonize and engage in libel conspiracies until they stop contributing.

I am just a simple Desktop user

What's more, no "simple desktop user" gives a shit about what their init system is. The moment you do, you cross the line from being a "simple" user and into an opinionated power user, who can do the legwork to configure things however they want and should stop bitching about how the distro maintainers package things for the noobs. When I'm a simple desktop user, I care about the following:

1. Stability
2. No performance issues that interfere with moderate desktop usage
3. Basic web, media and office usage without googling for issues
4. Minimal effort in configuration. I want UIs for package installation and UIs for service enablement
5. Integration. I want my packages to work together without me gluing them myself

Notice that politics, distro sponsorship and init systems aren't in that list. Simple desktop users don't have the tech overhead to waste cycles on that shit. Computing isn't their lifestyle. It's just a means to an end. That's why most simple desktop users just buy a pre-built computer and use whatever OS it came with.

If you're in the CLI, writing scripts for services, and compiling apps, you're not a simple desktop user. You're a power user with Stockholm syndrome who goes to the CLI because, after years of shitty UI/UX, you're used to it being the fastest and most efficient. I'm not saying it's bad to have these skills. I have them, too. It's just that if you think that these skills are the minimum barrier for entry as a "simple desktop user" you're an elitist asshole.

Stop pretending that anti-Red Hat and anti-systemd bullshit is driven by "simple desktop users". I'm a "desktop user". But I also self-host servers running multiple docker containers in an effort to get my data off the public cloud. And it's corporate development that's made the push for containers and virtualization a priority. I'm not running Red Hat distros, but I'm not stupid enough to hate them for not being me or not always doing my bidding. I'm just used to using apt. I'm not the kind of self-absorbed narcissist that needs to pretend everything I do has some profound reason to it.

I wouldn't switch to Devuan if they would decided to have an agnostic approach like Gentoo. I am fine with Devuan and OpenRC, don't have any problem and I don't need to use systemd whatsoever...

Then why aren't you using Gentoo? It works perfectly well. I've used it before. That's entirely community driven - no corporate sponsors there. Why does Devuan need to exist when there's already a distro with an agnostic approach? This whole "distro" could have been an overlay. Remember - I appreciate Devuan's labor and dedication. Not their ideals, approach, or critical thinking skills. Debian decided the maintenance burden of supporting all these different init systems wasn't sustainable for them. And they didn't want to do it, so they voted not to. Pure community IT laziness. Certainly not a reason to shit on them, as Devuan advocates do.

I'm cool with Devuan maintainers, but all the people online who talk about why Devuan was necessary like it's some sort of Linux life-support haven't shown any level of courtesy and community unity that pulls them out of the DIAF dregs of Linux. They literally just hop on to spout uninformed FUD and accuse everyone else of being evil for not taking orders from random keyboard warriors. Seriously, like 2 out of 100 of you aren't just mental STDs. You're the antivaxxers of Linux.

I want a distro that is Community driven

Finally, the community voted for Debian to do init the way it chose to. So what you want isn't a community-driven distro, because you left one when you decided that your values were more important than the community. You want a non-corporate sponsored distro that aligns with your ideals. Even if that means you have to rebadge corporate sponsored labor to do it. So kindly fuck off your high horse to Devuan town, thanks. I'll stick with the community that doesn't label all opposition as fraudulent. I had enough of that entitled bullshit confirmation bias in the last election. Seriously, what kind of idiot only believes in community leadership and democracy until the winds don't blow in their favor? You.

[piotr.dobrogost]

One of famous statements made by Stefan Kisielewski was "socialism heroically overcomes difficulties unknown in any other system", referring to the fact that many of the economic and social ills found under socialism were self-created. – from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_Kisielewski

Devuan is like socialism in this regard.

[Danielsan]

... You

Please don't be disrespectful, I didn't address you in a disrespectful manner.

Everything RH is only for their solely interest, when those interests overlap over a general interest everything is fine, when not it happens as for CentOS...
It leads the main development of Linux and related stuff in the direction it needs, not mine specifically, maybe your, who care?

I still prefer a space where corporate are outside, it is an ideological stand point, you disagree with me fine, but I am still free to express my opinion or do I have to request your permission?

[onlyLinuxLuvUBack]

As a plain end user (home servers for file serving, letsencrypt, wireguard, nfs, tvheadend, bittorrent, calibre etc, an embedded device for pi-hole, various embedded devices for audio streaming, some desktops and laptops etc) I find that systemd is a godsend. Yes, it was a bit of a bumpy ride to start with, and there was some new syntax to learn but the declarative format is so much better than bash scripting, but there is nothing that would persuade me to go back to sysv or upstart or any of the other init systems I used to use (and often hate). I have various machines that run 24/7 and others that boot and shutdown daily. systemd is fabulously reliable and easy to use and to customise with custom services or user managed services and has helpful logging. The haters might as well protest that cooking on gas or induction isn't as great as wood fired range or a cow dung fire or a hot ash pit.

The best things i like about systemd:
when it can't start the graphics mode and i'm stuck with nothing
and
when i connect a usb drive copy files, remove it, and then later when i shutdown that system, systemd will be stuck for like 3 minutes trying to cleanup a printer on a system that doesn't have a printer.

[Terrablit]

Please don't be disrespectful, I didn't address you in a disrespectful manner.

You set up this fake narrative of Debian being anti-choice, anti-democracy and anti-community as the driving force behind Devuan's creation. In reality, the Debian community was very pro-choice. They voted on the issue twice. Lots of people cast their vote and people got what they wanted. It just wasn't what you wanted.

Then you blamed the systemd usage on Red Hat, when, in reality, most major distributions use systemd because it has a lower maintenance burden with a larger feature set. You blamed people's preference on malicious corporate control, which is an outright lie. You're undermining the opposition by attacking their character. And you're playing on people's distrust of greed to gain a market advantage. Which is a dick move.

If all you did was leave to form a new community, that'd be fine. But instead, you go back to the old community and try to evangelize. Fake narratives and lies are disrespectful. Wasting my time is disrespectful. I said at the very beginning that everything you said was bordering on Linux luddite copypasta. I've seen it all before from you and from others. Ad nauseum.

It doesn't matter if you say dumb, malicious and false things in a polite manner. It's an attack on decency if not a personal attack on the mind to mislead others. Being polite to facilitate attempts to manipulate and control others is the essence of sea-lioning, which is a strategy of assholes. The pretense that a polite fist isn't an attack isn't a valid one. We all know when a person is being underhanded.

Devuan people wanted a systemd free distribution. Congrats, they did the work, and they're maintaining updates. More power to them for making what they want available. We certainly didn't care to do it for them, so it's good that they're doing it themselves. But that does not mean we have to accept their poisoned and objectively wrong narrative that:

* systemd is a control attempt
* Red Hat is a malicious force in the Linux ecosystem because they make money
* alternative init systems offered a similar level of functionality when distros made the switch to systemd
* script glue and disparate, unintegrated applications offer a user experience suitable for a simple desktop user.

There is literally no proof for any of this. It's just radicalized conspiracy Ahabs making up shit about a white whale and working each other up into a frothing, rabid rage against anyone in range. Anybody who comes in toting that bullshit gets tossed out on their ear just like the people who try to foist Watchtower magazines on me for donations. I don't want to join any cults. Regardless of whether they're science fiction or fantasy. Conspiracy theories, racism, and sexism "backed up" with lies are things I'm not willing to politely tolerate after 2020.

Everything RH is only for their solely interest, when those interests overlap over a general interest everything is fine, when not it happens as for CentOS

As far as CentOS goes, it sucks, but they've got to pay the bills. They didn't remove the free, but they did change the terms of what you get for free. And let's not forget the GPL doesn't require you to give your work away without remuneration. Redhat contributes all of its code as before. It's just changing the distribution method and service agreements to:

* get more feedback
* get more testing on newer packages
* prevent predatory commercial hosting services and downstream distro packagers (like Oracle) from profiting off its hard work
* facilitate them pivoting their business to cloud offerings

It sucks that the free ride in the limo is over, but choosing beggars get what they pay for. It's not the end of the world. It's a distro. It's literally packaging. Just use another distro and you'll get Red Hat's code without their opinionated padding. Or, use Redhat's new Stream distro for free. Life goes on, snowflake.

you disagree with me fine, but I am still free to express my opinion or do I have to request your permission?

No, but that freedom of speech means free speech can also be used to tell you to shut the hell up when you're using your free speech to the detriment of society. And other people's free speech is used to voice and vote for what they want. Like voting for init simplicity and a lower maintenance burden over doing the legwork for people who want choice just to be difficult. Free speech means dissent and discord. You have to accept the existence of the other opinion. Especially if you're going to persist in sharing an unpopular and publicly disproven opinion. It's not some fantasy arena where you speak your mind and everyone claps and the barista gives you a free latte.

You have permission to speak. You don't have permission to be a dumbass, but I doubt that's going to stop you. Like, have a good life and everything. I don't want you to lose out on all the good things coming to you over stupid FOSS politics. But it sure would be nice if you'd please learn to speak less about subjects you're ignorant on. I just say it with shock value in hopes of lending good sense some penetrative power when aimed at the denser side of the population.

[Danielsan]

You set up this fake narrative of Debian[...]

That was a farce, so much, that eventually they had to change path and starting the process to be again init agnostic.

It doesn't matter if you say dumb, malicious and false things in a polite manner.

Education is always good, but you missed the point as far as for everything. What lead RH is ROI that eventually is the cause of this:

As far as CentOS goes, it sucks, but they've got to pay the bills.

It doesn't matter how good is systemd, Debian is not a commercial product like RHEL, Ubuntu, CentOS, SUSE and even Fedora, what solves systemd has nothing to do with Debian itself, which is handled by volunteers that are never paid but just for the long term support. From a Debian perspective having 1, 2, 3 etc... init system is the same, even though they may had decided for having one as default, systemd for instance, I would be totally fine unless you have choices. But PR, lobbying, tricks like hardcoding systemd within Gnome were all parts of a precise scheme of pushing systemd for the sake of ROI but also control, which are pillars in every corporate mindset.

A project like Debian shouldn't be involved in those things and Devuan is born to fill this gap and it will exist until Debian will be able to provide to all the choices Debian user like or want, just because it is in its nature. Easy.

you to shut the hell up when you're using your free speech to the detriment of society.

You are too much arrogant but I don't really care, those are your limitations, but let me say what is really detrimental, these comments:

... dumbass ... stupid FOSS politics...ignorant on. I just say it with shock value in hopes of lending good sense some penetrative power when aimed at the denser side of the population.

This is you a lot of insults between vague technical definitions that really didn't make you cool as well as were totally ineffective to shut-up anyone.
My advice: just relax and learn some proper education.

[Terrablit]

You are too much arrogant but I don't really care, those are your limitations

You seem to mistakenly think I have a high opinion of myself. Really, I don't. It's just that I have a low opinion of you and the things you relentlessly choose to bring up. Your refusal to acknowledge that catering project development to the needs of its users as a good thing is indicative of a cognitive bias you've been toting around for almost a decade. Look at this:

But PR, lobbying, tricks like hardcoding systemd within Gnome were all parts of a precise scheme of pushing systemd for the sake of ROI but also control, which are pillars in every corporate mindset.

This is the entire point behind why everything you say is a lie and a massive waste of time. They weren't tricks. There were genuine issues that existing FOSS projects didn't care to solve until an annoying guy came along and decided it was time to roll all that stuff into a giant meta project and fix it. Logind replaced issues with consolekit - a project with issues and no dedicated labor. Tons of projects with holes in them and in between them got taken under their wing and regined.

You fail to realize that while the deployment of an unexciting plumbing project causes it to end up in end-user hands, they're not the real "users" - the target audience. Most people shouldn't want or care about how this stuff works - only that it does work. The target audience for systemd was distro maintainers and software distributors. People that need to roll out massive systems with different packages that were struggling with hundreds of unresolved and unmaintained issues. Those are the people that systemd took as its audience. It solved their needs, and saved their time. They're the ones that build the system, and they picked the solution that works for them.

Compare it to hiring an electrician or a plumber. You give them an end result and a few additional criteria (meets building codes, quality level of components, compatible with house plan). They supply the tools they need, buy the parts needed, cut things to fit, put holes in walls and reroute around things not on the plan. Most people aren't qualified to micromanage a certified professional in their area of expertise. Owners that try to do that get overcharged or fired by competent specialists because it's annoying af for someone who doesn't know what they're talking about to meddle in things and make it worse. In the end, the house owner uses the final product. But the target audience for pipes, sealing materials, saws, wrenches, etc is the plumber. The house owner just wants their water pressure, clean water, and no leaks. If you want to wire your own house and lay your own pipe, or pay a specialist to sit on his hands and follow orders like an intern, that's your problem. Everybody else does it the normal way of taking the industry standard with the industry-preferred tools. Init systems aren't end-user products, though end users will interact with them on a daily basis.

What you and others have been doing for ten years is spreading doom and gloom about the wrenches, pipes and wires the contractors used in building the house - calling the marketing and product development a "trick". Clearly making better tools and parts and marketing to them to the people who use them is a dirty trick and "PR". It's unfair for people to make new and better tools or parts. And it's unfair that the companies who made these tools listened to the people who used them and refined their product based on the user complaints.

You spend all this time arguing about choice and being able to swap out components for the stuff you bring along. Again, taking the construction analogy, you want to buy all your parts ahead of time at Home Depot to make sure you're not cheated. And you buy the best parts at Home Depot - without realizing that Home Depot construction supplies are really just the top of the low end of construction supplies. Like the terrible doors and locks they sell there. No contractor worth their salt would buy or use shit from Home Depot to build a house given the choice. It's cheap stuff sold as expensive to end users, and it only fools people because they don't work in the industry and they [don't] have a supply chain.

What simple desktop users care about is a "house" that's safe and stable. They don't want to sign off on every part on a massive BoM and learn about every step of building a house. They don't want to individually review every brand of every part. And pretending like they should care is the great lie of Linux "choice" luddites.

It's why people used to argue with you, but after ten years of you ranting about "Big Red Hat" and the unfair "tricks" they used of making better products and not hiding them under a rock, we really don't care about your feelings any more.

I'm glad you built your own Home Depot. It's great that you shop there. But don't try to pretend that making better products that better the lives of the specialists that build the distros is a "trick". In a real environment of choice, people choose to use the product with the best ROI. That's what happened. It's not a "trick" if everyone knows that it's the strategy that always works. And it's been almost ten years of revisionist rants by the ten foil hat brigade trying to paint it as unethical instead of inherently practical.

[Old Grouch]

Without writing a wall of text, my impression is that many people who dislike systemd in fact dislike the consequences of other projects that they use having a (hard) dependency on systemd, making more of their favoured software difficult or impossible to use without also including systemd.
It is still entirely possible to run a system that uses the Linux kernel without using systemd, but it will be missing many convenient and popular packages. Package maintainers will take a view of supporting the most used options, which makes the support of other init systems and associated software a lower priority, which can translate into getting no support at all.
I suffer from some behaviours of systemd that are WONTFIX. I don't have Lennart Poettering's abilities or influence, so realistically, I have to use software that doesn't quite fit my needs. Such is life. I can't afford a bespoke tailor either. It doesn't mean I enjoy wearing clothes that don't fit, but I am not skilled enough to make better ones for myself.
I'm sure something will replace systemd eventually, but not necessarily in my lifetime, and it might not be better.

[tuxd3v]

Nice to see the Devuan Community progressing..they bring choice and simplicity to the table.
Its user-base is steadily being increasing, they should have being doing something right..

[Danielsan]

You seem to mistakenly think I have a high opinion of myself...

Enough, I don't really care what you think as well as I don't like anything that becomes a personal war. You started this and I finish it. stop.