Devuan Beowulf 3.0.0 released

I've just spent a chunk of time helping check which distributions are current for the Distributions bit of LWN. There were about 400 entries - there are now 256. Going through to check whether websites existed, were current - there's an awful lot of sad abandonment of somebody's fork of Linux to scratch their own itch. Maintaining Debian is hard, maintaining any fork is hard - Ubuntu's a fork, every Ubuntu derived distribution is another and so on - but people do something to meet their particular need or want, scratch their own itch and create distributions accordingly..[Distrowatch.com has 957 entries in total and 300? active, from memory]

The arguments on Debian and Devuan mailing lists weren't pretty - but actually, folk from Debian and Devuan have found a way to work together to improve support for non-systemd within Debian as well. In the fullness of time, it will probably prove too much to continue Devuan on the number of maintainers they have for the one main issue they care about. Over time, it may be that more of the Linux ecosystem will require systemd. Over time, it may come to be that systemd is replaced by something else. Debian has been doing this for a long time - a couple of months longer than Red Hat, a month or two less than Slackware - that's geological epochs longer than most.

People do this Linux development thing for a whole heap of reasons, mostly not for bragging rights. Allow the Devuan folk to be happy in a major release - which they will have worked hard for - and don't disparage them for that. Nobody's forcing you to use it, but by being negative, it doesn't make the atmosphere better for anyone
[Disclaimer: I'm a Debian developer of long standing - I did read through all the arguments on the Debian mailing lists, I was sorry to see folks leave who decided that they could no longer work with Debian at the time. I used to maintain the Distributions HOWTO - so I'm fairly aware of how long distributions last and the exercise last month just confirmed this to me, sadly]