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A Look at EXE: The Live Retro-Style Devuan Spin
Quoting: What Is the EXE Linux Distro, and Should You Use It? —
EXE GNU/Linux is a variant of Devuan that's aimed to be lightweight and able to run primarily as a live distro. You can install it if you want to, but it comes with some tools for system rescue.
Devuan itself is an offshoot of Debian, made up of developers who split off from Debian after it adopted systemd for managing Linux services like web servers over the traditional System V init system. While systems now handles processes on most of the major Linux distributions, Devuan and by extension, EXE, doesn't.
Instead, Devuan promotes what it calls "Init Freedom." The older "SysVInit" is the default, and other systems are available to install for users who want them. The politics of systems were quite heated in the early 2010s because systemd was such a radical redesign of the way Linux booted up with its size and keeping the system logs in binary form instead of plain text the most controversial changes. Devuan and EXE are legacies of that era of transition in the Linux world.