Both Devuan ASCII and MX-18 are based on Debian oldstable (stretch) but MX includes many backported packages.

Try comparing the configuration of the desktops, for example:

lspci -k | grep -iA2 'vga\|3d\|display'
xrandr --listproviders
glxinfo | grep 'OpenGL r'

EDIT: the X.org log would probably be useful also.

Must be firmware then.

# apt install firmware-misc-nonfree

You may need to add the contrib & non-free components to your sources first though.

If an encrypted laptop is suspended then the key has to be stored in memory, systemd-homed has been created to enable the user password and encryption key to be unified so that the key doesn't have to be kept where a malicious agent can extract it.

So it's a new feature that solves a genuine problem. What a bunch of bastards, eh?

The elogind package which is the source of the linked problem was originally packaged up by Devuan and is also used by Gentoo so it should continue to work even if Debian drop it.

It may not be "hard" but there are currently 1033 packages that ship systemd unit files without matching init scripts[1], they don't currently work properly under sysvinit.

And it looks like some Debian maintainers aren't even testing existing init scripts, let alone adding new ones:

https://lwn.net/ml/debian-devel/b027c97 … 7@bzed.de/

https://lwn.net/ml/debian-devel/2018101 … piware.de/

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pu … _crackling?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd#systembsd

Not an official effort though: https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=141135403820631&w=2

At the moment the systemd package has a hard dependency on glibc and the corporate overlords are only really interested in maintaining the Linux dominance in the server & supercomputer markets. I don't think the Linux Foundation gives a crap about the desktop 'cos all the users are freeloading deadbeats. LOL.

Yes, you're right

Just create a file at ~/.config/chromium-flags.conf with this content:

--disable-field-trial-config

Any other switches can be added (on their own lines) to the file as desired.

EDIT: actually that might be Arch-specific, I don't have Chromium installed here.

The OP has an NVMe drive which is almost certainly an advanced format (4k) type — such devices cannot be booted by GRUB in non-UEFI mode even if a BIOS boot partition is present.

@pcalvert, why pin the rest of the repository to 50?

A pin value of 100 makes the MX repositories behave like backports, which sounds ideal for the intended purpose.

Also, their Flash package downloads updated Flash versions without needing to be updated itself so using the .deb might be the best option.

How exactly did you install Blender 2.80? Did you just download the tarball, unpack it then run the blender executable?

If you start it from a terminal does it show any error messages when it freezes?

Yes, you're right. XFCE has a dependency on libpulse0 but that only recommends pulseaudio itself. The GNOME desktop has a hard PA dependency though, perhaps unsurprisingly. No need to remove it anyway: just stop it from starting if you don't want it, as noted by dxrobertson earlier in this thread.

My point was that all the standard desktop environments include PA even if it's as a recommended component rather than a dependency per se.

Which desktop environments do not have PA as a dependency?

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure you know better than all those silly DE developers but they do seem to like PA.

From my laptop with my custom configuration for ALSA removed:

E485:~$ apt policy pulseaudio
pulseaudio:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 12.2-4
  Version table:
     12.2-4 500
        500 https://cdn-aws.deb.debian.org/debian buster/main amd64 Packages
E485:~$ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: Generic [HD-Audio Generic], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: Generic [HD-Audio Generic], device 7: HDMI 1 [HDMI 1]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: Generic [HD-Audio Generic], device 8: HDMI 2 [HDMI 2]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: Generic_1 [HD-Audio Generic], device 0: CX20753/4 Analog [CX20753/4 Analog]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
E485:~$ speaker-test                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

speaker-test 1.1.8

Playback device is default
Stream parameters are 48000Hz, S16_LE, 1 channels
Using 16 octaves of pink noise
ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:1108:(snd_pcm_dmix_open) unable to open slave
Playback open error: -2,No such file or directory
E485:~1$ 

As you can see the HDMI output is the default and I have no sound from the internal speakers.

EDIT: speaker-test output added.