Devuan “ASCII” 2.0 Release Candidate is now available

#1

Post by tgragnato » Wed, May 09, 2018, 11:42 PM UTC

Devuan “ASCII” 2.0 Release Candidate is now available
dev1galaxy.org

Re: Devuan “ASCII” 2.0 Release Candidate is now available

#2

Post by _jal » Thu, May 10, 2018, 1:07 AM UTC

Great timing for me. Just got the last of the parts in to build a network audio player, waiting for the weekend to start on it. I'll use this instead of Raspian.

Re: Devuan “ASCII” 2.0 Release Candidate is now available

#3

Post by nextos » Thu, May 10, 2018, 1:12 AM UTC

Devuan is basically Debian without systemd.

While I still prefer to run Linux distributions with systemd (NixOS and Arch in particular), I'm increasingly worried about the complexity systemd brings in.

I like how clean and standardized the init process is now. I don't like the bloat prize we've paid, though. I've been stracing my workstation for a few days. Journald starts eating a ton of RAM, ~100 MB upon boot, and keeps growing.

I'm annoyed because systemd developers claim 100 MB is normal. It's not, that's my biggest process on startup. And on my other Arch machine it stays at 25 MB, and they have a long history of memory leaks.

Re: Devuan “ASCII” 2.0 Release Candidate is now available

#4

Post by newnewpdro » Thu, May 10, 2018, 1:21 AM UTC

nextos wrote: post #3

Devuan is basically Debian without systemd. While I still prefer to run Linux distributions with systemd (NixOS and Arch in particular), I'm increasingly worried about the complexity systemd brings in. I like how clean and standardized the init process is now. I don't like the bloat prize we've paid, though. I've been stracing my workstation for a few days. Journald starts eating a ton of RAM, ~100 MB upon boot, and…

> Journald starts eating a ton of RAM, ~100 MB upon boot, and keeps growing.

You must subtract shared from resident to determine how much memory has been "eaten".

Journald uses mmap() for random access within the journal files. These pages are accounted for as shared because they are file-backed and may be paged out by the kernel behind the scenes if memory is needed - they'll just be paged back in from the filesystem if accessed later by journald.

Re: Devuan “ASCII” 2.0 Release Candidate is now available

#5

Post by freedomben » Thu, May 10, 2018, 2:05 AM UTC

_jal wrote: post #2

Great timing for me. Just got the last of the parts in to build a network audio player, waiting for the weekend to start on it. I'll use this instead of Raspian.

Why do you want to use sysvinit over systemd? Do you have init scripts already written that you don't want to port?

Re: Devuan “ASCII” 2.0 Release Candidate is now available

#6

Post by trollian » Thu, May 10, 2018, 2:13 AM UTC

I appreciate that they named their release after a no longer suitable character encoding. It does seem like a lot of trouble to go to to troll the systemd haters though.

Re: Devuan “ASCII” 2.0 Release Candidate is now available

#7

Post by newnewpdro » Thu, May 10, 2018, 2:18 AM UTC

_jal wrote: post #2

Great timing for me. Just got the last of the parts in to build a network audio player, waiting for the weekend to start on it. I'll use this instead of Raspian.

While I think it's great you have the option, it doesn't strike me as the best choice.

Re: Devuan “ASCII” 2.0 Release Candidate is now available

#8

Post by hedora » Thu, May 10, 2018, 2:31 AM UTC

I’ve been running the beta on my desktop. In this release, they have also established sane defaults for a wider range of window managers and desktop environments.

The rough edges I’ve hit can all be attributed to systemd brain damage (like the fact that the linux kernel no longer has a working, synchronous, “probe the network cards and create a logical interface for each one” primitive).

My only beef with devuan is that the beta install I have runs systemd’s elogind. It seems stable enough under devuan, but routinely broke under back when this machine was actually running systemd, and I plan to cleanse it with fire if it is still there after I update to stable 2.0.

I highly recommend devuan. Unlike Ubuntu, debian regularly rebuilds everything from source, and ~95% of their packages have reproducible builds.

For me, this, plus pre-systemd levels of stability and debuggability is a winning combination.

Re: Devuan “ASCII” 2.0 Release Candidate is now available

#9

Post by kbumsik » Thu, May 10, 2018, 2:31 AM UTC

Why they use "ASCII" for a distro release? This is so confusing name for people who don't know what Devuan is. I firstly thought some wierd guys created their own character encoding and claimed 2.0 version of ASCII.

Re: Devuan “ASCII” 2.0 Release Candidate is now available

#10

Post by craftyguy » Thu, May 10, 2018, 2:37 AM UTC

nextos wrote: post #3

Devuan is basically Debian without systemd. While I still prefer to run Linux distributions with systemd (NixOS and Arch in particular), I'm increasingly worried about the complexity systemd brings in. I like how clean and standardized the init process is now. I don't like the bloat prize we've paid, though. I've been stracing my workstation for a few days. Journald starts eating a ton of RAM, ~100 MB upon boot, and…

see newnewpdro's comment.

I just built a headless armv7h system (using Arch Linux ARM) with 1GB of RAM, and after being up for 3 days running nginx, ssh, and some other bare services, the total RAM usage, for all applications, is 70-100MB. Systemd is complex, but it really doesn't seem to add a lot of resource drain for the power it give you... I'm happy with that tradeoff.