Devuan OS GNU+Linux is a Linux distribution forked from Debian in 2015. The project's primary goal is to provide a variant of Debian without the complexities and dependencies of systemd, an init system and services manager originally developed by Red Hat and later adopted by most other Linux distributions. Devuan's initial beta release was made available in April 2016, together with an upgrade path from Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" and a possibility to switch to Devuan from Debian 8.0 "Jessie". The distribution adopted Xfce as its default desktop.

Devuan is a fork of Debian that uses sysvinit or OpenRC instead of systemd. The Devuan development team aim to maintain compatibility with other init systems in the future and not detach Linux from other Unix systems.

History
The release of Debian 8 alienated some developers and other users due to the project's adoption of systemd. The first stable release of Devuan was published on May 25, 2017.
Instead of continuing the Debian practice of using Toy Story character names as release codenames, Devuan aliases its releases using planet names. The first stable release shared the Debian 8 codename Jessie. However, the Devuan release was named for minor planet 10464. The second stable release is named ASCII for asteroid/minor planet 3568 and is based on Debian 9 Stretch. The third stable release is named Beowulf after minor planet 38086 and is based on Debian 10 Buster. The fourth upcoming release is named Chimaera after minor planet 623 and is based on Debian 11 Bullseye. The permanent alias for the Devuan unstable branch is Ceres, so named for the dwarf planet.

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.

Packages
Devuan has its own package repository which mirrors upstream Debian, with local modifications made only when needed to allow for init systems other than systemd. Modified packages include policykit and udisks. Devuan is supposed to work like the corresponding Debian release. Devuan does not provide systemd in its repositories but still retains libsystemd0 until it has removed all dependencies.
Amprolla is the program used to merge Debian packages with Devuan packages. It downloads packages from Debian and merges changes to packages that Devuan overrides.