Devuan has introduced the release of Devuan 6.0 “Excalibur,” a fork of Debian GNU/Linux that does not include the systemd system manager. This new version is characterized by the transition to the Debian 13 package base. Live builds (1.7 GB) and installation iso images for the amd64 architecture are available for download from the prepared links provided. Packages for various architectures such as i386, amd64, armel, armhf, arm64, ppc64el, and riscv64 are built and can be accessed through the repository.
The Devuan project maintains modifications to around 400 Debian packages to eliminate systemd bindings and adapt to Devuan infrastructure features. Two packages, devuan-baseconf and jenkins-debian-glue-buildenv-devuan, are unique to Devuan and assist in setting up repositories and operating the build system. Devuan is fully compatible with Debian, offering the option to create custom builds without systemd. Devuan-specific packages can be obtained from the packages.devuan.org repository.
The default desktop in Devuan 6 “Excalibur” is based on Xfce and the Slim display manager. Additionally, users can choose to install KDE, MATE, Cinnamon, LXQt, and Sway. Instead of systemd, the classic initialization system SysVinit is included, along with optional systems such as openrc and runit. Users also have the capability to work without D-Bus, allowing for minimalistic desktop configurations with various window managers. Network configuration is done using a variant of NetworkManager that is not linked to systemd, and eudev, a fork of udev from the Gentoo project, is used instead of systemd-udev. Different desktop environments utilize consolekit or elogind for managing user sessions.
The changes in Devuan 6 include a shift to the Debian 13 package base, Linux kernel 6.12, and adjustments to ensure compatibility with the sysvinit and runit initialization systems. Detailed information about the release can be found in the release notes.