Devuan, for all its posturing and despite being in a better position than Artix theoretically inhabits,
still does nothing of value. Oh yeah, it ships with sysvinit. Oh yeah, they "plan" to support XLibre... XLibre came out in June 2025 and Devuan,
to this fucking day as of June 2026 is still stuck at testing seatd whatever. The
GitHub wiki page is consistently updated; last change was allegedly 2 weeks ago, but the version history shows that it's not XLibre developers themselves shitting the bed with outdated documentation. No testing ISOs. No packages yet from what I can tell considering how fucking horrible finding proper Devuan discourse is on the internet nowadays. If you're a madlad who still has faith in Devuan and you wanna use XLibre now, you need the fucking third-party repack repo that already changed hands like several dozen times within the last year alone (hyperbole). What kinda bullshit is that?!
It is, as you say, the obvious move if you are a Debian user.
- Their manual migration process from Debian does work. However, the network can be borked if you are using UFW as a firewall. So I had half a Devuan install with iffy networking. I had to fix this with half the usual tools that you are likely to have.
- They mention an automated script to migrate from Debian. It doesn't work and will hose your distro. I had to bring back my Linux laptop install from the dead in rescue mode, fix fucking polkit by pulling an old version of polkit from the apt package cache, and then fix the networking and then fix the install, as I was in a weird half state where my distro wasn't Debian and wasn't Devuan.
It is easy to hose your system. I did a backup, and I did practise the migration in a VM.
After I got stuff running. You have lightdm with basically no theme, so I assumed it was broken (it isn't, and that is to be expected).
Having a login screen that looks broken as the first thing you see when you migrate, is just bad.
Once I got logged in. I was initially pleased as everything seems to work until I tried playing a video
They don't mention stuff like desktop audio at all. You need to add stuff to your
~/.profileto have desktop audio work properly.
Then you have to add some env vars to your
~/.profile to have Brave/Chrome be able to play audio.
This wasn't mentioned. Not a big deal, but would be helpful.
There were a bunch of things I couldn't run that use systemd. I didn't realise this until about 2 weeks later. Some of these were show-stoppers for me.
I could have worked around it, but the problem is that I spend enough times fucking with Linux distros (corpo ones) to get shit to work for a living.
I don't want to have to constantly do this at home.
Generally, it feels like a protest distro. I don't want a protest distro. I want a proper alternative.
The reason I migrated is because I let myself get wound up by this video by Sam Bent.
This is because I was outraged by the OSA and age check bullshit.
As an aside, I don't know what to think of these guys because while I respect Sam's ability at opsec and knowledge of darknet markets.
But Mental Outlaw, Sam Bent and some of the other guys that are basically tech libertarians sometimes don't investigate stuff properly or make a video to soon IMO
Sam (and Mental Outlaw), I think outside of that he needs to keep the FUD to a minimum because his brain works on the "government/police are always bad" premise.
I get it that they are agorist / anarchist types and that is their default position.
However, this often leads them to retarded conclusions, e.g., when Mental Outlaw covered AdeZero and her boyfriend, who did commit a bunch of computer-related crimes, and Mental Outlaw pretended it was glowies / Jews or whatever going after some dude for running a Tor node. It was actual misinformation/disinformation. This is why I keep most of the tech YouTube viewing to guys that fuck around with old enterprise tech and Amigas because there isn't some weird political aspect to it.
