After running Debian almost continuously for two and half years, I've decided to switch to Devuan. You might wonder why I’m moving away from Debian after such a positive experience. The truth is, I craved a bit of excitement in my life, or maybe I was just feeling bored during my fall break. I even wrote recently that I wasn’t looking for new adventures anytime soon, and while that was true, Devuan feels like a familiar territory—it's essentially Debian, but without systemd.

I’ve always believed that Devuan offers an alternative if not more authentic Debian experience, and I’m not even an anti-systemd zealot; I’m simply indifferent to it. I prefer a more straightforward approach in Linux, if given the choice. Devuan embraces this philosophy by promoting itself as a Debian fork without systemd, which resonates with me deeply.

My new Devuan installation with the XFCE desktop.

But my attraction to Devuan goes beyond just its systemd-free stance. I appreciate its simplicity and focus on tackling tasks one at a time. The first sentence on their website perfectly encapsulates this ethos: “Devuan GNU+Linux is a fork of Debian without systemd that allows users to reclaim control over their system by avoiding unnecessary entanglements and ensuring Init Freedom.” This statement truly speaks to me. The complexity of systemd often feels overwhelming, like a 64-armed octopus that controls every process, reminiscent of Windows and its constant push for user control. That's not what I want, even with my capable main computer at home.

While I don’t hate systemd, I find myself drawn to distributions that avoid it, such as Void Linux, Antix, PCLinuxOS, and others. So, I ran Devuan for a day, and, alas, then I got a weird problem with the file manager Thunar getting unstable when my NAS was disconnected from the system. I tried several options, but to no avail. I then installed Debian with minimal options, and I got the same issue. So, I installed Debian with all the default options when installing XFCE desktop, and the issue was gone. While I don't know, specifically, which missing packages were giving issues, I then knew that not installing all default packages was the reason for my issue.

So, right now I am in a bit of a dilemma: should I install Devuan without the hassle of setting up a minimal version, or stick with Debian? Whatever I decide, it doesn’t mean I can’t switch back to Debian or Devuan down the road. I have a deep appreciation for Debian, and it will always be part of my setup—I still run it on my Raspberry Pi and one of my laptops, and I’ll likely keep it on my main computer as well.

In any case, this is just a quick update on my turbulent distribution changes on my main computer.

Update [2024-10-25]:
Yeah, I stayed with Debian. I just love Debian's stability and reliability. Nothing can beat that.

Update [2024-11-05]: After having a weird issue with not be able to log out or shutdown the computer via the logout session manager (xfce4-session-logout), I really used a lot of time to try to figure out why was it happening in Debian. Even though I was able to log out, restart or shutdown the system via other options, it really bogged me not to be able to do these processes with the session menu. So I installed once again Devuan, but I had the same problem after doing all the post-installation rituals. So, I knew that it was probably a issue made by one of the reconfigurations I always make after the installation of a Linux distribution. And I think I found the culprit. All I did is: cd $HOME/.cache and rm -rf sessions while doing it in TTY1 (Ctrl-Alt-F1). Went back to TTY7 /Ctrl-Alt-F7), and the problem was solved. Now I have a fresh and fully functional Devuan installation, and I am tired of fresh installing an operating system (Debian), so I will just keep it for now.

Update [2024-11-06]: Now I have issues I often get; Thunar hangs if my Synology NAS gets disconnected/shut down. I tried many things to solve this—fiddling with fstab and all that, but I just cannot get to make it work in that particular situation. I am going back to Debian, because it works better there (probably due to systemd options). Oh, man....