Release of the Devuan 3 distribution, a fork of Debian without systemd

Submitted by release of the Devuan 3.0 "Beowulf" distribution, fork Debian GNU/Linux shipped without the systemd system manager. The new branch is notable for the transition to the package base Debian 10 "Buster". For loading prepared by Live builds and installation iso images for AMD64, i386 and ARM (armel, armhf and arm64). Devuan-specific packages can be downloaded from the repository packages.devuan.org.

The project has forked about 400 Debian packages that have been modified to get rid of systemd bindings, rebranding or adapting to Devuan's infrastructure features. Two packages (devuan-baseconf, jenkins-debian-glue-buildenv-devuan)
are present only in Devuan and are related to setting up repositories and the operation of the build system. Otherwise, Devuan is fully compatible with Debian and can be used as the basis for creating custom builds of Debian without systemd.

The default desktop is based on Xfce and the Slim display manager. Optionally available for installing KDE, MATE, Cinnamon and LXQt. Instead of systemd comes the classic init system SysVinit. Optional foreseen a D-Bus-free mode that allows you to create minimalistic desktop configurations based on the blackbox, fluxbox, fvwm, fvwm-crystal and openbox window managers. To configure the network, a variant of the NetworkManager configurator is offered, which is not tied to systemd. Instead of systemd-udev is involved eudev, a fork of udev from the Gentoo project. To manage user sessions in KDE, Cinnamon and LXQt, elogind, a variant of logind not tied to systemd. Xfce and MATE use console kit.

Changes, specific to Devuan 3.0:

• Switched to the Debian 10 "Buster" package base (packages are synchronized with Debian 10.4) and the Linux 4.19 kernel.
• Added support for the ppc64el architecture, in addition to the previously supported i386, amd64, armel, armhf and arm64 platforms.
• The possibility of optional use of the system manager is provided runite as an alternative to /sbin/init.
• Provided the ability to use the initialization system OpenRC as an alternative to the sysv-rc service and the runlevel controls.
• Added separate background processes eudev и elogind to replace the monolithic systemd components responsible for managing device files in the /dev directory, handling external device connection / disconnection operations, and user session management.
• A new display manager has been added, the boot design has been changed, and a new desktop theme has been introduced.

Source: opennet.ru