Over two years after the previous 5 “Daedalus” version, the Devuan team has officially released Devuan 6 “Excalibur”, the latest stable version of the systemd-free Debian derivative.
Powered by Linux kernel 6.12 LTS and leveraging the new APT 3 package manager, this release is based on Debian 13 “Trixie” and inherits most of the changes introduced in Debian 13, while maintaining its own independent direction.
The main highlight is that a merged-/usr filesystem is now mandatory, following Debian’s policy. In light of this, users upgrading from Devuan 5 “Daedalus” must ensure they have installed the usrmerge package before proceeding.
The other big change is that Excalibur introduces PipeWire as the recommended audio system, replacing PulseAudio in most setups to offer lower latency and improved performance across both desktop and console environments.
On the desktop side, the default installation comes with the Xfce 4.20 desktop environment, while KDE Plasma 6.3.6 and GNOME 48 are also available from the distro’s stable repositories.
Regarding software, the distro includes a thoughtfully chosen set of free applications. By default, you get just the essentials: Firefox ESR 140.4, LibreOffice 25.2, and Parole Media Player 4.18. For developers, the distro repos include refreshed package sets, such as GCC 14.2, Python 3.13, PHP 8.4, OpenSSL 3.5, MariaDB 11.8, PostgreSQL 17, and many others.
As with Debian 13, support for the i386 architecture has been reduced. Devuan no longer provides a 32-bit installer ISO, although packages remain available in the repositories for legacy systems that still require them. Architectures fully supported include amd64, armel, armhf, arm64, ppc64el, and riscv64.
The release also restores /run/utmp session registration, improves repository organization, and updates installation media. A simplified CD structure now separates minimal server and desktop installations, while larger desktop environments, such as KDE and Cinnamon, are available through the netinstall and desktop ISOs.
Installation images for Devuan 6 are available at files.devuan.org. All installation media include non-free firmware, automatically installed only when required by the system’s hardware. Users who prefer a fully free setup can opt out through the “Expert install” option or remove the firmware afterward using a provided script.
For more information, see the release notes.
A direct and well-documented upgrade path from Devuan 5, “Daedalus,” is available, as well as a migration path from Debian 13, “Trixie,” for those wishing to switch to this systemd-free alternative.
Lastly, with “Excalibur” now established as the latest stable release, the Devuan developers have begun work on Devuan 7, codenamed “Freia,” which we can expect to see in the second half of 2027, a few months after Debian 14 “Forky” is released. Repositories for the next version are already open for early testing.
