Devuan GNU+Linux

Reader supplied reviews for Devuan GNU+Linux Average rating 9.0 from 171 review(s) 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: -- unstabletesting6.1.05.0.14.0.03.1.02.11.0.0 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: 6.1.0 Rating: 10 Date: 2026-01-03 Votes: 35 Asus B75M-A mobo, Intel 3220 cpu, 1Tb Seagate HDD, Intel integrated graphics, 16Gb memory. Downloaded this latest point release and did a clean install. The install is hands down a lot faster, and smoother, than Debian 13 Trixie proper. I like this new point release, it's quick, clean and has just about as much as I need or want from my OS. I choose to remove any firefox or thunderbird offerings if there are any after installation and go with derivatives Betterbird and Waterfox as I prefer them to the main line based upon. I went with the Xfce desktop and like the graphics. Had a problem with how to pin my Internet offerings onto the panel and a quick question to the wonderful world of the web I was directed to activate a little plug-in to the panel which helped me and to show which program was open when I minimized it from the desktop screen. I like that it's based on Debian for support purposes and don't find this non-systemd offering lacking in anything to me. Desktop is crisp, software is snappy when open and running and I am able to install a couple of odds & ends through CLI, or synaptic that gets me to be where I want to be. I believe Devuan 6.1 to be well supported, alive & very active and am not concerned about if it will be here next year or the next. Very good job indeed to the Devuan team! Thanks! Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 6.0.0 Rating: 10 Date: 2025-12-18 Votes: 33 Upgraded from Daedalus to Excalibur via the instructions a few weeks ago. So far so good!! Been using Devuan & before systemd, Debian. Before Devuan was a choice it was Slackware/Salix; until it was feeling really stale. Fortunately Devuan had it's bearing by then and have been there for quite a bit. It's not like I don't try some others in VM's; (mxlinux, Mint, Slackware-Salix, ??) but just haven't found anything yet to really want me to make a change the network. If there was it could possibly be Slackware/Salix but don't know if something happened to Patrick V what the result would be. Getting tired & old; late nights dinking with puters til odd hours is over. Devuan - good & stable; XFCE - light & good enough to get the job done. Personally don't need a bunch of eye candy. Been using computers when you either got a green or amber screen. No mouse needed. Miss it sometimes. I still use a computer to get some work done. I'm done now. PS - I couldn't believe it when "xsane" recognized and worked with my old Canon scanner. No drivers in Windoze worked since XP I think. Canon-ugh! another story. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 6.0.0 Rating: 7 Date: 2025-12-03 Votes: 0 I would not recommend Devuan for beginners in Linux as the text-based installer is not as user-friendly as the ones for easier distros like Linux Mint, MX or Tuxedo. Also, it seems more buggy and less well configured than Debian stable on which it is based. For example, when I installed Devuan 6 with KDE Plasma desktop, the SDDM login screen had white text on a white background, making it impossible to see the various icons and menus on the login screen such as the option to choose between Wayland and X11 sessions. This is due to a badly configured SDDM theme files and requires reinstalling and re-applying the Debian breeze SDDM theme to fix it. Next, entering local hard disk partitions in /etc/fstab does not result in the OS auto mounting them at boot time. You have to manually create the mount point directories before it will mount to them. Maybe this ability to automount fstab partitions is something that systemd does in other distros and so is missing from Devuan since it does not have systemd, but MX Linux sysvinit flavours also auto mount partitions found in fstab. Thus, first impressions are that it is not as well tested and configured as upstream Debian and has more bugs. The one advantage that Devuan has over Debian is that, perhaps because it does not have systemd, it saves you 700-800 MB of RAM overhead. Yes, Devuan KDE uses 700-800 MB less RAM at idle than Debian KDE on my hardware. Devuan KDE uses even less RAM than Mint XFCE. This could be an important consideration for those with older computers with less RAM, or those who want the OS to be as light on system resources as possible in order to maximise gaming or app performance (in which case try Devuan with XFCE rather than KDE for even lighter system resource usage). However, if stability and well-configuredness are important, Debian stable or Linux Mint are a better choice. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 171 reader reviews of Devuan GNU+Linux...