Devuan upgrade

Posted 12-02-2020 at 03:12 PM by stuartd

Wow! It's years since I have written here. I see I wrote about putting Slackware on an old laptop. I have that machine still but don't use it. I got it out last year and booted it up. It still works.

I have a desktop machine. I'm writing at that now. Just this evening I upgraded my Devuan ISCII version to Devuan Beowulf following the instructions of the Devuan web site. It went well - I think it went well, I haven't found any problems so far.

I chose Devuan because I wanted to get away from SystemD - don't flame me, we all have our ideas and needs.

I moved from Linux Mint earlier this year. I decided I'd like to commit to a distribution over which I had more direct control. What I read about SystemD made me wonder how much control I could retain in future. I gave it some thought and decided I'd commit to doing more of the maintenance myself. So here I am.

Mint was good. I found it easy to use and it looked good to. I use XFCE desktop as it seems less hungry than KDE or Gnome.

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	I understand that Devuan is Debian without systemd. Can you explain for a rookie like me, what is the matter with systemd ? Why there's a lot of people doesn't like it ? Thanks !
	Posted 12-02-2020 at 03:43 PM by CruxoM

Quote:

Originally Posted by CruxoM

I understand that Devuan is Debian without systemd. Can you explain for a rookie like me, what is the matter with systemd ? Why there's a lot of people doesn't like it ? Thanks !

CruxoM, first off my decision to adopt a distribution that does not use systemd is purely personal and I am not advocating for or against anyone's choices. There have been flame wars about this kind of stuff and I really don't want to get into arguments about it.

I chose to go without systemd because I think that systemd obscures the initialisation processes. Without systemd initialisation files are in plain text and may be edited by users/admins. With systemd the initialisation processes is not in plain sight but is undertaken by an overseeing daemon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd

I lived with it for years and it made no difference on the surface to my day to day use of Linux Mint.

Since moving to Devuan and no systemd I have found I need to do a little more system administration. That was no surprise, as I said in my post, I wanted more control - and that means more work. But it's not an arduous amount of work, once a month or so I back up all my data then check the system for upgrades. Yesterday while trying to install Krita I got a message from my system saying the depositories I wanted were no longer there. It occurred to me that my version of Devuan (ASCII) was older and maybe I needed to upgrade to Beowulf. It took me a while following instructions I found on the Devuan web site but I got there.

Under Mint I think I would have had to leave it all to the automatic processes governed by systemd - I may be completely wrong about that but....

After upgrading the whole installation and logging into a new look version of Devuan I feel empowered: I did it! That gives me great satisfaction.

Right now in our present circumstances having control is doubly important to me.

In the long term free software is important, if it's free as described by the Free Software Foundation: https://www.fsf.org/ "Free software means that the users have the freedom to run, edit, contribute to, and share the software. Thus, free software is a matter of liberty, not price."

There you have it.

To anyone else reading this: I don't want to get into a long technical conversation about the advantages of systemd - I am not really qualified for that. I made my choice, you make yours.

Posted 12-03-2020 at 04:36 AM by stuartd stuartd is offline

	Ok. It's not a matter of functionality in itself, it's a matter of who takes control in this part of software. It's your choice, following the FSF principles. Cristal clear, thank's for your explanation...!!!
	Posted 12-03-2020 at 07:08 AM by CruxoM

Quote:

Originally Posted by CruxoM

Ok. It's not a matter of functionality in itself, it's a matter of who takes control in this part of software. It's your choice, following the FSF principles. Cristal clear, thank's for your explanation...!!!

Got it in one

And by the way. In the upgrade process all my other applications were updated too and I now have shiny new front ends for them.

Enjoy your computing.

Posted 12-03-2020 at 07:13 AM by stuartd stuartd is offline