Old school enough to favor Debian, but averse to systemd? Good news: Devuan 6 “Excalibur” is here, and all you need to do is draw it from the stone master its installer.

Devuan 6, codenamed after the legendary King Arthur’s equally legendary sword, was released this week. Version 6 is the Devuan project’s version of Debian 13 “Trixie”. As the release notes say:

Devuan 6 Excalibur is based on Debian 13 Trixie. Much of the information in Debian’s Release Notes is relevant and useful. They should be consulted alongside this document.

The Devuan live media defaults to Xfce – an appropriately no-nonsense choice. - Click to enlarge

This is essentially the same OS as Debian 13, but with Agent P’s sprawling “system and service manager” surgically removed, along with any packages that are so dependent upon it that they can’t be separated. Like Trixie, it uses kernel 6.12 – currently the latest LTS kernel – and the PipeWire audio server. As with Debian since version 12 “Bookworm”, the installation media contains proprietary firmware files, mainly for Wi-Fi controllers. That can be removed post-install, if you wish.

Perhaps as a consequence, although there are lots of supplementary GNOME tools in Devuan’s repositories, the GNOME desktop isn’t included. Debian 13 includes GNOME 48, which was released in March, a few months before the GNOME project announced stronger dependencies on systemd. We will venture a prediction: GNOME probably will not be returning in Devuan 7, which is codenamed Freia and will follow Debian 14 sometime in 2027.

It looks very similar to the previous release, Devuan 5 “Daedalus”, which we reviewed in August 2023. Perhaps the most visible difference is that Devuan 6 no longer offers an x86-32 edition: the primary downloads are now x86-64 only, or as Debian and Devuan call it, amd64.

Devuan 6 can also run on three flavors of Arm and one of PowerPC (all little-endian, like Intel, rather than the older big-endian format). These are armel, for low-end 32-bit Arm kit; armhf, which is for 32-bit Arm with hardware floating point, mainly meaning older Raspberry Pi kit; arm64, which is 64-bit Arm v8, sometimes called aarch64; and ppc64el, meaning 64-bit POWER hardware in little-endian mode. However, for these, there are no complete CD or DVD ISO images, only mini.iso files for network installation, plus kernels and packages for net-booting. Notably, unlike Debian itself, there is no RISC-V port, and contrary to some reports, no 32-bit x86 edition either.

We found it amusing that the Get Devuan page simply says:

netboot: Files for PXE install, mini.isos and installer disk images for some specific boards can be found in the appropriate directory for your $ARCH at

https://pkgmaster.devuan.org/devuan/dists/excalibur/main/installer-$ARCH/current/images/

In other words, rather than provide a hyperlink, the author of the page expects the reader to copy the text, work out the abbreviation for their desired architecture, edit the URL to insert the abbreviation in place of the part delimited with a dollar sign, and proceed from there. Call us cynical if you wish – it’s true – but we suspect that this would be a great deal too much for the average Raspberry Pi owner. This is emblematic of Devuan’s attitude: this is a Linux distro aimed at skillful techies who know what they’re doing and don’t need much hand-holding.

Devuan 6 retains the minimal Slim display manager – and by default, there’s no choice of sessions except Xfce on X11 - Click to enlarge

As such, it has the same installer as Daedalus did, with the same glitches that we reported a little over two years ago. It looks the same and feels the same, while the latest Debian has gained a little more polish.

Many contented Devuan users won’t see the installation process, of course, because they will upgrade from the previous release. This is documented and supported, but you must make sure you have a merged /usr hierarchy first – as The Register described way back in 2016. This is as simple as installing one package:

root@devuan:~# apt-get install usrmerge

It’s possible that if you’ve extensively customized your installation, though, this may take some preparation.

x86-64 media are available for download in several different formats. Listed first is the desktop-live edition, which we tried under the latest VirtualBox 7.2.4.

It comes with Xfce 4.20 and the X.Org display server, and uses the rather clunky Refracta installer. Rather than a default partitioning scheme, it offers a choice of partitioning tools. We used Gparted, and since VirtualBox defaults to BIOS rather than UEFI, we created a simple old-style layout with MBR: an 8 GB root partition, a 10 GB /home partition, and 2 GB of swap. You must pick the option to use a separate home volume right at the start, so we had to restart the installer. This ran to completion without error, but it didn’t successfully install the GRUB bootloader.

We had to reboot from the ISO and do that manually. Once again, this is not a distro for beginners. Before adding anything, Excalibur took 4.6 GB of disk space and under 500 MB of RAM, which is good for 2025. We then installed updates and the VirtualBox guest additions – from the bundled ISO, because they aren’t in Devuan’s repos – which requires build-essential, dkms and the latest kernel headers. Afterwards, it took 4.9 GB of disk and 684 MB of RAM. That’s still not too bad, but then, there are no fripperies like animated graphical boot screens or fancy wallpaper photographs here. For an idea of what to expect, this edition has its own README.

Alternatively, you can boot into the installer in traditional Debian (and openSUSE) style. There are five separate CD-sized images, which the download page describes as follows:

server: CD1 of a 5 CD set that allows for a complete off-line server/minimal installation. The remaining CDs offer several desktop choices and a limited selection of additional software.

• CD2: Additional server packages.
• CD3: Basic desktop packages and Openbox window manager.
• CD4: MATE and XFCE desktop.
• CD5: LXDE and LXQt desktops.

Alternatively, there’s a single-DVD-sized 4 GB image which additionally offers KDE Plasma 6.3.6. Alongside these, there’s a 592 MB netinstall image, which contains just enough software to get online and start the installation program – so you will need a fast (and unmetered) internet connection. There’s also an 876 MB minimal-live ISO, which is “a full-featured, console-based recovery tool with a focus on accessibility for visually-impaired and blind users.”

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Devuan has a whole page dedicated to Init Freedom. Excalibur defaults to the classic sysvinit, but also offers the choice of OpenRC, runit (we’re still not sure whether to pronounce this “R-unit” or “run it”), or GNU Shepherd. We looked at the latter when it reached version 1.0 late last year. Still under consideration are sinit from the Suckless project, and s6. Unlike, for example, Gentoo’s wiki page, we don’t see any guidance or recommendation on their relative merits.

Despite its classic more-than-three-decade-old init system, Devuan has a dynamically managed /dev tree, which is managed by the eudev daemon from Gentoo.

Devuan 6 looks and feels very much like Devuan 5 did. That’s no bad thing: we’re advocates of Bert Lance’s maxim, if “it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” and we suspect that also applies to the Devuan maintainers.

We still feel that the split between the Debian and Devuan projects was a tragic mistake, and it must result in a lot of duplicated effort between two teams that were both already short on resources and volunteers. However, 11 years after the fork was announced and a decade after the project hoped to ship, it seems unlikely the divide can be bridged now. Excalibur has beaten the other optionally-systemd-free MX Linux project to release: MX 25 just reached release candidate 1 a week ago. The Debian Trixie-based MX Linux will default to systemd, and only offer sysvinit-based Xfce and Fluxbox variants. We feel that the developers behind these two projects really should meet up and work out some way to cooperate. ®