A great aspect of Devuan is its inherent stability and resistance to security bugs that become well well known throught the linux community way before they reach even the testing part of the distribution.  In this respect Devuan is one up on security even from the mothership, Debian, as Jessie is still stable on Devuan.  So between 2-3 months in lag it is even more secure than Debian.  When a security bug appears and a fix is produced it flows down to stable and in the future old-stable, in a matter of hours of updating the mirrors.  When testing (ascii) becomes stable (the parallel of Stretch) which might only be a few weeks from now, and for about the next couple of years this will be the true Devuan, Devuan 2.  Jessie will still have at least 3 more years of support.

But can you sneak and peek at what Debian repositories have and whether they would work on Devuan?  Sure you can, and you must be careful when you mismatch.  Pretty much anything on Debian is also on Devuan.  Excluded are only those packages that would require dependencies that lead to the installation of systemd and the removal of any other init system you may have chosen.  My preferred combination is sysvinit with runit as backup and supervisor.  It works flawlessly.  Devuan architecture includes safety measures that systemd WILL NOT install unless you really wanted to.  But if you were to do such a thing you are left with a pure Debian, so why bother with Devuan at all?

There is also a plethora of Debian based distributions with many different specialty tools whose repositories you can also utilize and experiment with.  But it is amazing how their dependency on systemd goes far enough to reach all sorts of systemd dependencies.  So be careful before you mess your system up.  I mess around using synaptic as it provides a multi-step way of committing to installation showing you exactly what it will bring in.  Whether it is multimedia tools, security, anonymity, pen-testing, there is a Debian based distribution full of tools and specialty programs.

All this variety comes on top of a core system that is even more conservatively stable than Debian.  It is hard to beat such a distribution.  On the other hand the only other foundation of such variety of readily available packages is Arch and “community”.  Arch’s philosophy is to get anything new, cutting edge (but not bleeding edge), instantly available.  Arch based distros have the newest versions of all packages that could possibly run on a linux system.  This is where Artix comes in to do the exact same thing that Devuan does with Debian.  Very different focus but between the two I can hardly imagine what it is you may want that one of those two systems will not provide.