With the release of
Debian 8, some developers and users felt alienated due to the project's adoption of
systemd and subsequent removal of support for other existing init systems. This decision prompted some Debian community members to start a
fork of Debian without systemd. Instead of continuing the Debian practice of using
Toy Story character names as release codenames, Devuan aliases its releases using minor planet names. The first stable release shared the Debian 8 codename
Jessie. However, the Devuan release was named for
minor planet 10464. The first stable release of Devuan was published on May 25, 2017. Devuan 2.0.0
ASCII was released on June 9, 2018, and 2.1
ASCII was released on November 21, 2019. ASCII provides a choice of five different
desktop environments at install time (
XFCE,
Cinnamon,
KDE,
LXQt,
MATE), while many other window managers are available from the repositories. It also provides installation options for choosing between
sysvinit and
OpenRC for
init, and between
GRUB and
LILO for the
boot loader. Devuan maintains a modified version of the Debian expert text installer, which has the ability to install only
free software if the user chooses, while the
live desktop image also uses a custom graphical installer from Refracta, a derivative of Devuan. Devuan 3.0 Beowulf was released on June 3, 2020, based on Debian 10.4.
Ppc64el has been added to the list of supported architectures.
Runit is now available as an alternative init. Eudev and elogind are now used to replace some
Systemd functionality. Devuan 4.0 Chimaera was released on October 14, 2021. It is based on Debian Bullseye (11.1) with Linux kernel 5.10. Devuan 5.0 Daedalus was released on August 15, 2023. It is based on Debian Bookworm (12.1) with Linux kernel 6.1. Devuan 6.0 Excalibur was released on November 2, 2025. It is based on Debian Trixie (13) with Linux kernel 6.12. ==Packages==