> It is built in the simplest way, using Devuan debootstrapped system with kernel, dtb, u-boot, and board support packages from Armbian<p>By the way, reading this, an idea just hit me. It persistantly seems evident distro maintains often struggle to maintain huge repositories in both well-tested and up-to-date state. Why don't we separate OS distribution and apps repos into separate independent projects? Perhaps it could be enough for distro authors to concentrate on maintaining the actuall OS (system packages). Probably also a humble number of essential apps. Everything else could be then maintained in form of PPAs by whoever is interested.<p>Even existence of distro "flavours" focusing on specific DEs always felt a quirk to me. An operation of installing and choosing a specific DE should never have been requiring any attention from the distro author. The fact it does suggesrs there are quirks which have to be addressed, these should better be polished away globally than worked around in every installation script.
Is Devuan still having a usecase? No offense, I am simply curious. Lately I see statements that you can use standard Debian and have it instaled without systemd. It won't be the default I assume, but how do Devuan and Debian (without systemd) compare nowadays?
> Both Armbian and Devuan have their own toolchains for ARM boards and both have fatal flaws: the former is locked to systemd-based distros, the latter has poor support for ARM boards.<p>Isn't it possible to improve Devuan's toolchain so that it better supports ARM boards?<p>And, for that matter - isn't it possible to do the same for Debian itself, so that the delta to Devuan would inherit decent support for ARM boards?<p>I'm not a toolchain expert, so an answer with links to explanation of relevant concepts/jaron would be appreciated.<p>---<p>Regardless - I'm always happy to hear news about widening adoption and influence of Devuan. I believe a non-systemd distribution is the way to go and am glad Devuan offers that for the Debian space (while Debian, unfortunately, forces systemd on you and it's not just an option).