Devuan GNU+Linux

Reader supplied reviews for Devuan GNU+Linux Average rating 9.0 from 176 review(s) Please select a rating in the range of 1-10. Please write at least a few sentences about the distribution while limiting your review to 4080 characters. What are your thoughts on Devuan GNU+Linux? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- unstabletesting6.1.15.0.14.0.03.1.02.11.0.0 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: 6.1.1 Rating: 6 Date: 2026-06-06 Country: Ireland Votes: 0 I like Devuan but it always had some funny quirks in it that are just irritating and excalibur has not broken from that tradition. If you are installing it and dont plan on changing the appearance, its great. I like they ironed out all the quirks in the drivers such as the wifi drivers not being detected and amd graphics being included but this time my irritation is with customisation. So I installed the xfce edition from the desktop iso and saw they replaced lightdm with slim which for me is a terrible move. The implementation of slim is beyond inefficient in my view. Having to select f1 to change your desktop if you install more than one DE is terrible. What is worse is that your selection does not save either so you are in perpetual f1 mode every time you boot. Now ordinarily you would think that if you can install lightdm and set it as the default login manager but excalibur does not swing that way. If you do this, then when you reboot you are presented with shell login. Once you login and run startx, it will inform you that it wont start because slim is not the default login manager. So the next logical step is to reach out to the community on their forum and yet the only response you get is ' I did not have that issue'. So to get around this little issue, I installed the cinnamon desktop with gives you lightdm. Now the next issue was the default desktop because it wont save the desktop you last selected. The command does not have any say over what is the default desktop. So what I had to do is remove all desktop files from /usr/share/xsession in order for me to be able to have the desktop I wanted. Now next up was the fact that during install, your user account is not setup in sudoers which is also in debian, easy command but still irritating. The next thing was to customise the grub. Ordinarily you install grub customizer. Not with devuan though because it wont read the grub as devuan have stored the grub files in /boot instead of /etc. I was able to manually edit the grub config file manually there but still painful having to go through the process of finding this out. Nothing works from a customization perspective like it works on other distros. What makes it worse is that there is no documentation telling you about these differences or changes. Additionally the forum was useless. I cant understand how someone responds on a thread to say, 'it does not happen for me' is remotely helpful. Overall, I think that this release of devuan is worse than the last. At least in the last release the issues were easily resolvable. This release sends you through the ringer with little to no help. The main issue with the release is that the dev team have moved and symlinked alof of stuff which has caused the standard stuff to not work. I fyou are happy installing devuan oob, go for it but if you plan on making it yours, find something else. I feel devuan have taken alot of the freedom out of this distro that it once had. You should not have to do this much tinkering to customize a distro. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 6.1.1 Rating: 8 Date: 2026-06-01 Country: United States Votes: 2 Devuan 6 doesn't install with Calamares for me (tried Peppermint and Venderfoul Wolf which use the "universal, distro-agnostic" installer) multiple times without success. This new version of Devuan uses the Refracta installer, which offers a fairly simple GUI installer. If you pay attention to what you're doing it's effortless and fast. Once installed it's "slow" to boot up, but for me that doesn't matter. I'll go to the kitchen, grab a cup of coffee, and it's all booted up by the time I get back. Once booted up, it's very fast, unencumbered with all that tentacled bloatware that systemd has become. Two Refracta tools are installed by default (in both GUI and text versions): Refracta-snapshot and refracta-installer. Interestingly, Devuan does NOT have refracta-2-usb preinstalled, but offers "mintstick" in the repositories, which allows me to format a USB stick and write a bootable snapshot to it. If you are accustomed to APT and Synaptic Package Manager, you'll find managing packages snappy and still awesome in Devuan 6 (Excalibur). Very nice, very fast. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: testing Rating: 10 Date: 2026-05-08 Country: Iceland Votes: 51 Devuan 7 continues the project’s tradition of delivering a clean, stable, and transparent Linux environment without the complexity and overhead of systemd. After running it extensively on modern hardware and a ThinkPad workstation, the experience is consistently impressive. Boot times are fast, memory usage is lean, and the system remains responsive even under heavy multitasking. What stands out most is Devuan’s architectural clarity. With SysVinit, OpenRC, or runit available as first‑class init systems, service management is predictable and easy to audit. Tools like Lynis integrate naturally, and the absence of systemd’s monolithic stack results in a noticeably smaller attack surface. Logs are readable, services behave consistently, and nothing runs unless you choose it. Performance is excellent. Devuan 7 uses significantly less RAM than systemd‑based distros, and CPU load remains low even with KDE Plasma on Wayland. Firefox, PipeWire, and modern desktop components run smoothly without any of the overhead or background churn typical of systemd environments. Despite being a testing release, Devuan 7 is remarkably stable. Package management with APT 3 is fast and reliable, hardware support is solid, and the system feels lighter and more responsive than Debian or Ubuntu on the same machine. Devuan 7 may not be aimed at beginners — and that’s because it prioritizes transparency and user control over automation. It is a distribution for users who value control, transparency, and technical integrity. If you want a modern Linux system that respects UNIX principles and avoids unnecessary complexity, Devuan 7 is one of the best choices available today. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 176 reader reviews of Devuan GNU+Linux...