crankypuss wrote:

the best i'd found before Devuan was Ubuntu-MATE but it was only booting properly maybe 2 times out of 5, the rest of the time it was systemd-ing.  It seems like this whole systemd fiasco has cost the linux community bigtime.

Interesting, I have an old lenovo x220 here with ubuntu mate. On this machine it's a perfectly stable setup which does boot properly every time, but YMMV. Obviously better without systemd. ;-)

(As a side note, as a VSA ('veteran systems administrator' who has to take care of a company network with many linux machines, windows machines and mac os x machines) I need to have in-depth knowledge in other operating systems as well, so I'm not able to switch all my machines to devuan.)

For the most part i was using an xps-13 which i have now consigned to hardware hell for being the biggest PITA that i ever paid way too much for.

Now i'm using a Lenovo t510, which is i5 instead of i7 and lacks a solid state drive, but it's fast enough for what i'm doing; the Lenovo "thinkpad" is a much nicer and better built machine imo, but it's not sleek and pretty ligaf.

crankypuss wrote:

Everything seems so much more solid without systemd <hehehe>!  The default desktop environment seems much better integrated.

I'm curious: does the "Time and Date" configuration work?

Menu → System → Time and Date

Reference: https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=2770

i'm not sure that's how i did it, but the date/time panel widget was adjusted to my preferred format, and Caja shows the date in my other preferred format.  No telling what other apps are doing, most of what i use isn't big on showing the date/time, and i don't think i went to it through that menu path.  shrug.

the best i'd found before Devuan was Ubuntu-MATE but it was only booting properly maybe 2 times out of 5, the rest of the time it was systemd-ing.  It seems like this whole systemd fiasco has cost the linux community bigtime.

Interesting, I have an old lenovo x220 here with ubuntu mate. On this machine it's a perfectly stable setup which does boot properly every time, but YMMV. Obviously better without systemd. ;-)

(As a side note, as a VSA ('veteran systems administrator' who has to take care of a company network with many linux machines, windows machines and mac os x machines) I need to have in-depth knowledge in other operating systems as well, so I'm not able to switch all my machines to devuan.)

Not a problem, the only place the mouse was visible is an icon that's now something else.

With desktop-base, the Devuan "swoosh" icon should have replaced the mouse.  Hmmmm . . . have to check on that.

@crankypuss . . . If you install desktop-base you will get the complete darkpurpy theme from grub to slim to the desktop including custom colored directory icons.   If you don't do that, you get the rodent.   The parts of the beowulf theme are available from a thread on this forum but they are not yet integrated into the beowulf desktop-base.

Not a problem, the only place the mouse was visible is an icon that's now something else.  I've been tweaking things up, thus avoiding work lol.  Thunar isn't my cup of tea, but Caja hasn't gone completely brain-dead yet and my scripts make it useful.  Using the old jessie install for backups and such isn't entirely a bad thing, since backing up a quiesced system is more solid than writing a backup from a running one; the reboot is a pain, but less pain than getting zend's ncurses extension to build.

I'm amazed at how slow Windows still is.  But i'm amazed by lots of things.  It's nice to have a system that boots solidly, the best i'd found before Devuan was Ubuntu-MATE but it was only booting properly maybe 2 times out of 5, the rest of the time it was systemd-ing.  It seems like this whole systemd fiasco has cost the linux community bigtime.

Everything seems so much more solid without systemd <hehehe>!  The default desktop environment seems much better integrated.

I'm curious: does the "Time and Date" configuration work?

Menu → System → Time and Date

Reference: https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=2770

I really like XFCE4 (except for the rat logo lol)

It's a mouse, actually. ;-)

I really like XFCE4 (except for the rat logo lol), especially their launchers, and the fact that when you install a new application, it shows up in the system menu and the properties menu, that's an advancement for the linux versions i've used lol.  Everything seems so much more solid without systemd <hehehe>!  The default desktop environment seems much better integrated.

Nice work, 4.5 stars!