Just dropping a line to say that as of today, I've officially switched
from Linux Mint to Devuan and I am loving it ;) I have switched over my
development PC and will switch over my laptop shortly. My mailserver and
webserver (currently both on Ubuntu) will also be changed soon, when I
have time to dig into it. I have been experiencing (i) persistent
problems with the webserver where systemd won't let the server process
run, seems to think it is respawning too fast or something, and (ii) a
one-off problem with the mailserver where all networking failed and
investigation eventually revealed that systemd-resolved was the cause,
however the problem went away after I enabled diagnostics and restarted
systemd-resolved... didn't give a confident feeling for the future!
Anyway, on the development PC, I am not sure if it's my imagination but
it just seems so much lighter and faster than what I was running before.
It might be because I was on Debian via Ubuntu via Mint, whereas now I'm
on Debian via Devuan, and there could be less cruft added. And in
particular the bootup seems a lot quicker, which is surprising really
since one of the claims about systemd is that its dependency based
startup should be quicker. Hmm. Anyway I have always found systemd to be
quite oppressive, since I haven't got time to waste on sysadmin tasks
beyond quickly searching and maybe downloading a script or whatever. To
create systemd units is quite a learning curve, and although I've done
that in the past I've never really been sure I did it right. And I could
not be bothered learning the syntax for things line systemctl,
journalctl and whatnot -- I'd rather use simpler commands to view logs
and such.
So, I couldn't be happier, and I want to say a massive thankyou to the
community. I wish we could somehow spread the message and get everyone
onto Devuan.