Nope, I just start it straight from console, too. I can get Xfce and nearly every other graphical program working swell without Elogind running, but I do need to keep some of its libraries around because of their precompiled settings.

SpaceFM is awesome, and the things you mentioned about its customizability is part of why I main it now. I even use it as my desktop manager, so the Xfce one isn't needed in that regard.

I've been running this setup for the past year with very little problems. Using Udevil's Devmon for rootless auto-mounts and SpaceFM for manually unmounting (among other things, like using a script to regain trash functionality lost by removing GVfs originally).

EDIT: if you're running chimaera then I would recommend iwd instead:

# apt install iwd orphan-sysvinit-scripts wpa_supplicant- connman- dhclient-
# cp /usr/share/orphan-sysvinit-scripts/iwd /etc/init.d/
# update-rc.d iwd defaults

Then use iwctl to configure your wireless connection and add this to /etc/iwd/main.conf:

[General]
EnableNetworkConfiguration=true

And add a network configuration stanza to /var/lib/iwd/<name of SSID>.psk, for example:

[IPv4]
Address=192.168.0.23
Netmask=255.255.255.0
Gateway=192.168.0.1

The wlan0 lines can be removed from /etc/network/interfaces once iwd is configured.

See also https://wiki.debian.org/WiFi/HowToUse#Using_IWD

auto wlan0

and then manually edit /etc/network/interfaces and add it after devuan launch.
Then after

ifup wlan0

network is back...otherwise if I leave it at start of devuan it shows me an error about already configured network
I must say I'm quite a newbie so any help is welcome

iwlwifi no beacon heard and the time event is over already

then stopped at last...Nevertheless I went further first by installing consolekit and associated libpam

apt-get install consolekit libpam-ck-connector

It went on flawlessly uninstalling some other packages by the way but as soon as I uninstalled elogind

apt-get remove elogind

I lost my wifi network. I had to manually edit the network configuration following devuan instructions

nano /etc/network/interfaces

auto wlan0
allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
      wpa-ssid myssid
      wpa-psk mypassphrase

then save with Ctrl+X and then

ifup wlan0

Network was back
Concerning pmount and spaceman it works great so thank you again !

apt --no-install-recommends install <package>

If you want to avoid installing elogind by mistake, you could pin it by creating a file in /etc/apt/preferences.d/ with the following:

Package: *elogind
Pin: version *
Pin-Priority: -1

### ctrl-alt-F2 and then log in as root.
/etc/init.d/slim stop
apt remove elogind libpam-elogind consolekit+ libpam-ck-connector+

That replaced elogind with consolekit and removed a bunch of other stuff, including gvfs, udisks2 and network-manager. I replaced network-manager with connman and set connman-ui-gtk to start with the desktop.

apt install connman connman-ui connman-gtk

The user can no longer shutdown or reboot from the desktop. I assume that mounting of removable media is also gone. I don't know if there are fixes for this.

An alternative approach would be to do a minimal install, switch to consolekit first, and then start adding things.

For sure not everybody is willing to remove elogind but Linux is choice so I'd like to use consolekit 2 instead as advertised in devuan chimaera release notes.

Problem is even when I launch xfce4 with parameters

startxfce4 --with-ck-launch 

elogind is still running in the background...
So removing elogind crashes everything

But it is said that both ck2 and elogind are mutually exclusive.
So is there a step by step guide to do it post installation?
Thank you in advance