Devuan Linux, the Debian fork that offers "init freedom" has announced the first release candidate for its second version.

Dubbed "ASCII", Devuan 2.0 uses Debian Stretch as its base, doesn't use Systemd, and reached beta in February 2018.

This week, the developers behind the distro announced ASCII's first release candidate, along with news that the installer "now offers a wider variety of Desktop Environments including XFCE, KDE, MATE, Cinnamon, LXQT (with others available post-install)."

"In addition, there are options for 'Console productivity' with hundreds of CLI and TUI utils, as well asa minimal base system ideal for servers," the team stated.

Linus Torvalds may have damned systemd with faint praise READ MORE

The candidate's expert install option "offers a choice of SysVinit and OpenRC ".

Images for bog-standard x86 and x86-64 PCs, plus Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone, OrangePi, BananaPi, OLinuXino, and Cubieboard devices, Nokia N900 handhelds, and several Chromebooks, and some hypervisors, are already available to download here.

The Devuan team has been busy: it is already working on a third release, dubbed Beowulf, and told followers that “images should be ready for testing soon.” Beowulf is based on Debian Buster, which is undergoing testing. Another Devuan flavor, Ceres, right now uses the unstable Debian Sid distribution, and is there if you like using, developing, or testing bleeding-edge code. Ceres is perpetually in an unstable state, and is never formally released.

Devuan appears to be doing quite well. The distribution took a while to deliver on its 2014 promise to fork Debian. But it's now on close-to-annual release cadence after Devuan 1.0 debuted in May 2017. ®