Devuan 4.0 ‘Chimaera’ Systemd-Free Distro Released

The Devuan community has announced the release of Devuan 4.0, codenamed Chimaera, which strives to make GNU/Linux free of systemd.

Devuan came into existence in 2014 due to Debian shifting to systemd after a long technical and much-publicized debate.

The move led to several Debian developers coming together to create Devuan by removing all traces of systemd from the Linux distro, instead sticking to the well-known init system, sysvinit.

The name Devuan was chosen as a blend word, formed from parts of two others โ€“ โ€œDebianโ€ and โ€œVUA.โ€œ And if youโ€™re curious what โ€œVUAโ€ means, itโ€™s the shortened form of Veteran Unix Admins.

Devuan aims to be a base GNU/Linux distribution to protect Init Freedom and grant backward compatibility for existing sysvinit users on Debian.

Now you are probably wondering, whatโ€™s wrong with systemd? Itโ€™s a long story, and the objections are technical and political – a discussion for another day. So letโ€™s now focus on the new Devuan 4.0 release.

What’s New in Devuan 4.0

The first thing youโ€™ll notice about Devuan is how quickly it booted because usage of sysvinit, which is the init system of choice of Devuan. But, of course, during installation, you may also prefer to use some other init system such as openrc or runit.

Devuan Installer

Devuan continues to be based on Debian, and the latest distro version, Devuan 4.0, is based on Debian 11 โ€œBullseye.โ€ 

One of the things it inherits from Debian is support for a wide range of hardware architectures. Devuan is one of the few distros that continues to put out installation media for 32-bit x86 systems, in addition to the popular 64-bit platform. Furthermore, Devuan also supports the arm64, armel, armhf, and ppc64el architectures. 

Devuan is an Xfce distro by default. However, it provides MATE, Cinnamon, KDE, and LXQt in its repos. Virtually all desktop environments available in Debian are now part of Devuan 4.0. The latest version of the distro comes with KDE Plasma 5.20, Cinnamon 4.8, MATE 1.24, and Xfce 4.16 desktop environments available in the distro repos.

Devuan 4.0 Chimaera

Installation via GUI or console can now be accomplished via software or hardware speech synthesis or a refreshable braille display. On top of that, Devuan Chimaera can install desktop environments without PulseAudio, simultaneously allowing speech synthesis in both console and GUI sessions.

Furthermore, Devuan 4.0 comes with a new boot, display manager, and desktop theming. And in conclusion, if you are curious, the next Devuan 5.0 release will be codenamed โ€˜Daedalus.โ€™

For more information about all changes in the new version, refer to the release notes or visit the projectโ€™s website.

Download

You can obtain the latest release of Devuan installation ISO from the project’s download page. The Devuan ISO can be written to the drive with the dd tool.

There are two mechanisms for installing Devuan. One, via the Live CD, which uses the Refracta Installer, and the other via the install-only media, which uses a modified Debian installer.

Bobby Borisov

Bobby Borisov

Bobby, an editor-in-chief at Linuxiac, is a Linux professional with over 20 years of experience. With a strong focus on Linux and open-source software, he has worked as a Senior Linux System Administrator, Software Developer, and DevOps Engineer for small and large multinational companies.

Think You're an Ubuntu Expert? Let's Find Out!

Put your knowledge to the test in our lightning-fast Ubuntu quiz!
Ten questions to challenge yourself to see if you're a Linux legend or just a penguin in the making.

1 / 10

Ubuntu is an ancient African word that means:

2 / 10

Who is the Ubuntu's founder?

3 / 10

What year was the first official Ubuntu release?

4 / 10

What does the Ubuntu logo symbolize?

5 / 10

What package format does Ubuntu use for installing software?

6 / 10

When are Ubuntu's LTS versions released?

7 / 10

What is Unity?

8 / 10

What are Ubuntu versions named after?

9 / 10

What's Ubuntu Core?

10 / 10

Which Ubuntu version is Snap introduced?

The average score is 68%