Devuan is the Debian fork that exists for one clear reason: to provide Debian without systemd. It emerged when a group of developers disagreed with Debian's init decision and committed to preserving what they call init freedom. The distribution defaults to sysvinit and also packages alternatives such as OpenRC and runit, while everything else remains deliberately close to its parent: APT and deb packages, the same archive layout, and releases that shadow Debian's stable cycle under different codenames. Because compatibility is a stated goal, most Debian software runs unchanged, and Devuan in turn acts as the foundation for a number of smaller systemd-free distributions. Typical users include administrators with strong opinions about service supervision and people maintaining older or unusual setups where a simpler init is a practical advantage. You can compare its boot and service behavior against stock Debian in an OpenFactory browser VM.
Select a version of Devuan Linux to try online:
| Excalibur: | |
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| Daedalus: | |
| Current: | |
| Chimaera: | |
| Beowulf: | |
| 5.0: | |
| 4.0: |
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