My biggest wish is Ubuntu (and Debian) switching from systemd to any other init system. I know that won't happen but I was asked and that's the only thing I want, whenever you like it or not.
Just saw the video and must say that it has really sparked my interest in Devuan. I heard of Devuan when the fork was first announced but never gave it much notice, now is the first time I try to understand what it really is. It seems like Devuan is much more organized and well-thought than I imagined. This is music to my ears:
Devuan will do its best to stay minimal and abide to the UNIX philosophy of "doing one thing and doing it well". It will foster diversity and freedom of choice among all its components and will perceive itself not as an end product, but as a a process, a starting point for developers, a viable base for sysadmins and a stable tool for people who have enough experience with computers. Devuan will never compromise for more efficiency at the cost of the freedom of its users, rather than leave that and the responsibility for
a secure setup to downstream developers.
I need to do much more research and of course testing, but Devuan could be light at the end of the tunnel.
I need to make much more research before I will convince anyone, but as a start I like the philosophy of Devuan very much.
I have moved many many servers from Debian to FreeBSD after the announcement of systemd, and this has been great, but I must agree with you that on the desktop it can be a little inadequate.
This is a big part of why I moved away from Ubuntu. I know this is a difficult situation - whenever Ubuntu tries to find a better solution it gets flak for dividing the community. But here it would have been great to have Ubuntu with an alternative to the disaster that is systemd.
I want software to be simple, well-engineered and lightweight. In my opinion systemd is the exact opposite of that. I think this page explains it well: http://suckless.org/sucks/systemd
In practice I have had many extremely frustrating problems with systemd including systems that suddenly became unbootable.
we are very close to release Jessie stable, backed by a vibrant community
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=devuan
For those preferring an introductory video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMvyOGawNwo