That laptop should have a DVD drive. Its possibly easier to boot from there instead of from USB.

And if only 512M of RAM is installed, this isn't good enough to start from.

Edit the headline in your initial post and add a [Solved] or something similar there.

BTW: afaik slim no more is maintained. It might be a good idea to switch to i.e. lightdm.

What are we talking about? Chimaera, Daedalus, Excalibur? Anything else?

Checked on my Daedalus with backports enabled. Synaptic shows version 2.2 from the standard repo, and 3.0 from backports as available. Nothing about 3.6.

The metapackage lazarus-2.2 re. lazarus-3.0 should install the complete suite.

To get hold of version 3.6 you must have added an external repo. What exactly did you do regarding this "trick" to synaptic?

The sources.list seems to be ok, but what is present in /etc/apt/sources.list.d? This tailscale repo must come from somewhere ... Iguess thats the problem.

What have you installed from there?

I use

# apt list libreoffice*

There the backports packages are present. The solution for the complete package is e.g. libreoffice-gtk4 or libreoffice-qt6. There are no single packages for writer.

Anyhow: nothing from backports is installed automagically. Pinning makes sure backports doesn't have highest prio. If you want to install something from backports, you need to specify that by using:

# apt -t daedalus-backports install $Packagename

Maybe this device has some internal setting that keeps it from changing the MAC.

Have you read the post by Rob Landley? This split was done in the late seventies simply due to practical reasons namely space limitations of available storage media. There is nothing more behind it. It was a workaround and had nothing to do with what you call 'safety' or the Unix way.

This workaround finally is removed which I think makes sense nowadays with the size of media available today.

@Ron: is this summary something you can get?

Give it another try until it works.

@stopAI: Don't expect any further insight, I am a simple user running a small home network with some PCs here.

I am with Devuan since ASCII was Testing and I discovered that ASCII supported my method of encryption/automatic decryption during bootup I used to use with my Debian installations before systemd. For some reason I started with openRC.

My experience that openRC did not care for non-critical but irritating error messages, understanding that openRC is more or less just an add-on to sysvinit, reading some of the forum entries and comments from fsmithred and ralphronnquist pointing to sysvinit as the primary init system made me try this on all my installations I have done from last year onward, and I miss nothing.

View of a simple user: sysvinit is just functional, I have moved back from openrc to sysvinit.

... Whatever got installed with cinnamon with --no-install-recommends, no additional packages.