I came across this more recent one.
Food for thought or at the very least, interesting to watch.

Best,

A.

As far as minimalism: installers should all offer it, but then everyone would complain about how long it took to install a new full DE system, and updaters would have to be rewritten for every DE.

I was under the impression that devuan desktop install iso is for those who want desktop environment working ASAP.
And netinstall is more likely for those who want a minimal system. So is there any real harm done if avahi and some other packages are made optional in netinstall?

Haven't touched Arch yet. Would like to figure out first how to make guix usable.

just stumbled across this(video circa 2017):

"Convincing a Linux guy to use FreeBSD" - Lunduke Hour - Feb 9, 2017(approx-1hr15min)
ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cofKxtIO3Is

I strongly dislike avahi

Pretty much a modern neccessity for a lot of networking functions.

A good choice for people who have never run BSD. I've been testing it for about two months now and have found no particular problems with it, at least nothing important other than the normal known imitations of BSD. I recommend it if you want to tinker with BSD.

As far as minimalism: installers should all offer it, but then everyone would complain about how long it took to install a new full DE system, and updaters would have to be rewritten for every DE. Might as well be Arch then.

For me open-box wm written with lua coded hooked display options would make for a very simple but easily customizable desktiop. Right now Linux is suffering from hardware overdose, and free software is facing a difficult choice. Will AI take over development or not. Both choices are ominous. It's hard to tell if we are going backwards or forwards.

TC

dbus, systemd, network-manager, pulseaudio, pipewire, wayland, avahi, java and their libraries being completely OPTIONAL is the only way I would think that devuan could meet that standard of what I would desire.

For most parts, sounds like a good start. I strongly dislike avahi and networkmanager. But on the other hand i'm neutral towards dbus.
I guess i could figure out how to make alsa work without those pulse/pipewire/whatever, if i really want to.
Would like to add all polkit-related packages to that list.
Although that is for security-reasons, not minimalism-related.

One problem comes to mind with Gentoo btw, cpu usage is a lot.

Unless I am mistaken and something is being missed here.

I want my computers to be more efficient and use less power and Gentoo wouldn't improve on that I don't think.

Although, OpenBSD could be the same, so idk.

Not sure how OpenBSD does power saving wise on old hardware vs new hardware.

And for that matter, architectures like ARM as well including 64 bit.

Infectors meaning bloatware beasts like redhat.

OpenBSD and Gentoo are possibilities I suppose. I myself don't know how I would do this of course though.

Tried gentoo once,  it was ultra hard.

If I want a minimalistic system I have two choices...

OpenBSD or Hyperbola.

... Or NixOS, Gentoo, CRUX, Gobo, FreeBSD, or any other system that provides tooling to build packages locally with the configuration you want.
Were you motivated enough to do so, this can also be achieved with Debian/Devuan... It's just a bunch more work as the packaging tools don't really cater to global feature switches the way e.g. Gentoo USE flags or the nixpkg declarative build system do.

What you're really asking for appears to be a binary distribution where all the configuration and packaging work is done for you, yet the choices the maintainers make are precisely aligned with your preferences... That's not going to happen, regardless of how much you complain about it.

You want the Devuan developers and maintainers to fork and rebuild everything to run without $things_you_dislike, yet you're not even willing to properly define what you want or what would be needed to achieve it?
Not to put too fine a point on things: Get off the grass.

dbus, systemd, network-manager, pulseaudio, pipewire, wayland, avahi, java and their libraries being completely OPTIONAL is the only way I would think that devuan could meet that standard of what I would desire.

Aka, not needing those packages + their libraries would be my criteria.

If that cannot be reached, then it is mostly futile.

As for specific packages, those are the system ones that prevent a minimal devuan install but specifically which are okay in my book?

I cannot say completely, because I would have to wade through devuan to find them. It would be very tricky to specify them all given Devuan has 50K+ packages.

Probably less than 10K of them would fit my bill.

In any case, I am not sure what you meant by meeting a minimal system design.

My criteria are probably impossible for devuan unless signifiant changes were made.

And no i don't expect them to be met. This isn't for the faint of heart after all.

As you know, there is no single "Devuan System" as Devuan is a repository of packages that includes all Debian packages except those that are or relies on systemd; it is your choice.

OpenBSD or Hyperbola.

All the others don't seem minimal enough.

Devuan is not minimal enough, but I will definitely use it for ARM64 since Hyperbola don't support it.

Maybe moving on to Alpine becomes a good idea.

I think it's worth considering. At the very least, you could install Alpine in a VM in order to become more familiar with it. That's what I'm planning to do. Even if I don't use it as my main OS, I may still use it for some other purpose.