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. 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. 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.
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.
