...on my spinning rust test HDD, once you tame the 'beast', it runs pretty good, there's a few rough edges, but that's to be expected. It feels a lot like a no-frills Debian, but without that certain init, you know the one, wink wink.
I didn't even think Devaun would actually see the light of day, nevermind release a beta, I'm so glad they're still 'alive', choice and options are always good.
If you're not familiar with Debian, its quirks, permissions issues and how to tweak a basically bare bones OS, don't waste your time. If you do take the plunge, you'll have a lot of fun like I did (aside from the occasional wanting to punch the screen, lol).
Their default desktop is Xfce, I installed MATE (the now very stale 1.8.1, but that's OK, it's usable and I made it 'pretty' fairly quickly) on purpose (because I love MATE now and wanted to see how the installer would handle it, read on), which was a fun ride (I'm being a little sarcastic here), after it downloaded and "installed' the desktop meta and its child packages, it said an installation step failed! WHAT?!
So I come back to the computer (not going to sit at it with slow wifi and a spinning rust install, it's like watching paint dry, or grass grow) and hit enter to get back to the main installation menu and go through the package/desktop installation step again, I had to deselect 'Devuan desktop' (again) and re-select MATE, fortunately, because the installer recognized all the necessary packages were ALREADY downloaded, it did it's unpack/install/configure routine again SUCESSFULLY without having to re-download or start the whole install process all over again! Thanks for the heart attack Devuan, that was so kind. 
When I finally got to the desktop, it was like a ghost-town, very few things installed and a lot of default settings, yuck! I quickly remedied that.FYI, if you do give it a 'spin' (it's not a 'live' disk, it's an installer), enable backports, tons of everyday multimedia apps need the dependencies from backports to install. Not only that, I was given the option to install kernel 4.6.0 from their backports, which I did, to my amazement, it runs really well, so well in fact that my computer idles at the desktop practically in a coma, lol (seriously, this is rare these days with misconfigured/bloated kernels from some distro maintainers). Why am I saying this, because I've tried the 4.6.x kernel branch in other distros, and for some reason, they make my computer work harder for nothing at idle. That's what happens when somebody slaps together a kernel and shoves it up in to their repo, upload first, ask questions later, lol.
It works but it's definitely NOT for noobs, if you want an old-school Debian-like experience (barebones, hands-on tweaking), give it a whirl, it's a BLAST!
Edit/footnote: The only file/package I found (installed) related to that 'other' init is "libsystemd0", apparently CUPS refuses to work without it (I researched it), which is a crying shame.
Edit 2: The LIVE version of Devuan Xfce (their default desktop) made by Nelum can be found here, happy kickin' the tires.
). Be sure to install any microcode and firmware that applies to your machine, trust me, it makes it run waaaaaaaay better. Also, if grub is not installing to the actual install drive MBR, you can 'force' it by selecting 'manual' and typing in the drive, in my case it was /dev/sde, the 'auto' grub MBR install doesn't fail but I think it gets installed to root instead, requiring a separate grub/boot-loader on the machine to boot in to Devuan (which I fortunately have on my sda MBR). Keep in mind, my install was done by the 
