Considering the size of the install (it was huge) it went without problems. Restarting (new kernel) gave a blank screen, which was heart-stopping (I've had to do repairs on remote servers from the grub command-line in the past and do not want to ever have to repeat that again). Restarting the computer then gave Recovering Journal which is excellent considering the alternative, but not really something that you want to see.

Naturally I've got gripes. Don't much like the colour scheme (sorry, the blue is too bright for my taste). The fonts are different everywhere. mlocate has gone & been replaced by plocate.

The grub startup screen was missing the Devuan theme, and the default Debian grub screen is pants. It probably happened due to a wrong choice during setup, but here is how to fix that: The file to look for is /etc/default/grub. There were two files in that dir:

1. grub

2. grub.ucf-old

Doing a diff showed that the old file referenced the Devuan theme. I therefor added the following line at the bottom of 'grub':

$ tail /etc/default/grub
# Uncomment if you don't want GRUB to pass "root=UUID=xxx" parameter to Linux
#GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_UUID=true

# Uncomment to disable generation of recovery mode menu entries
#GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY="true"

# Uncomment to get a beep at grub start
#GRUB_INIT_TUNE="480 440 1"

GRUB_THEME=/usr/share/desktop-base/grub-themes/desktop-grub-theme/theme.txt

The final fix is to run update-grub and now the Devuan theme shows on startup.

This is what my /etc/apt/sources.list looks like after I remembered to comment-out the Chimaera releases (the first attempt to upgrade did not work because of that!):

$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus                  main non-free-firmware non-free contrib
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-updates          main non-free-firmware non-free contrib
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-security         main non-free-firmware non-free contrib
# deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-proposed-updates main non-free-firmware non-free contrib
# deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-backports        main non-free-firmware non-free contrib

I've now issued sudo apt-get update & several hundred updated files are installing.

Isn't it blooming amazing that anyone can design these things?

Have you cleared your cache? I had to to see the changes.

You are right. Shift-f5 & there we are: "Daedalus 5.0 is the current stable release."

Ah well. Let's see how well prepared everything is.

You noticed! It's been less than an hour since the repo links got changed. So yeah, we are in the midst of the change. Give the mirrors a couple hours to catch up. When we're sure everything else is in place, the website will be updated and there will be an official announcement. Stable installer isos and live isos are already in place.

That's good, I was beginning to think Devuan was dead...

Get it?

I got bitten too many times trying to bridge conflicting releases, so am trying to be patient until those two pages reconcile themselves.

It has to be said that the earlier bad experiences were with CentOS, and that was because RedHat deployed technological measures to prevent folks from in-place upgrading from one major release to the next (presumably to force a new release to be purchased but I don't actually know why, I just know that they did it). It's bad enough dealing with a difficult Home-based system, but 10 x worse when it is a remote server that your finances depend upon. Everything was fine going from 3 => 4, but then it got more & more difficult and by CentOS-6 it was clear that going from 6 to 7 was going to be impossible unless you wiped the disk clean. Despicable twats.

Stable installer isos and live isos are already in place.

That's very good news! Thanks to all the devs!

Devuan.org Home page still says: