Yes, one does not need to select any of those options. They are all "extra". But the dialog flow includes installing unmentioned default components, and the dialog must be ok-ed for that to happen.

Thus, one must bring up that dialog and click ok, even though one may opt for not picking any of the pickable additions.

Yes, the Devuan wiki attempt is abysmal. It's certainly far from ready for fly-by contributions. It will take someone with editorial interest and commitment to get involved and make soemthing happen.

So where did you go wrong in your study of turnstile?
It's not a login manager and it doesn't provide any root services.
Iit merely runs user scripts as user.

No, turnstile does not "handle login sessions". It gets notified about login and logout happening, and then it runs (or terminates) user scripts qua the user (not as root). I think it'd be much less of a hacker's attraction than, say, dbus, since turnstile is very well contained in what it does.

But for sure, there are many other ways for users to run programs, and there is no real need for a system to have a turnstile daemon to manage running them with "session control". I agree on that aspect

EDIT: btw, which thread title would you set?

Yes, I wouldn't have mentioned it otherwise.

In my experience the packaged turnstile daemon is quite stable and safe. The package default backend, despite its name "suss", also works quite well. (I haven't explored the other backends) It provides a reliable "user service" process control including both one-shot actions and session-based services.

The expected "normal" use is straight-foward. A user that wants many services with start-up inter-dependencies may of course need to design that start-up somewhat carefully.

In short: a good option.

@igorzwx: I don't understand what you mean with that "warning"? Have you been using it and ran into issues?

Yes that should be fine.

As far as I know, the only possible caveat in that would be if the USB stick was of a kind that doesn't allow block 0 to be updated. But it's very unusual to run into those nowadays. To be really sure about that you would need to copy back the USB content to the size of the ISO into another file, and then compare that with the ISO (e.g. by using shasums).

It sounds like you are using a legacy bios boot on a disk image file. That boot equipment variant does require that the boot partition is marked as bootable, which appears no to be the case for you.

In your case it looks like

%sudo ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

is the last matching entry, at least when the shutdown user is in the sudo group.

Not at all. Gentoo is fine. People using Gentoo are fine. Do that with Gentoo resources.
This forum is intended for Devuan focus.

Off topic babble seems to be the menu of the day. I could delete but I'm not too comfortable doing that.

Do we have someone standing up to take on maintainer role? You can email me.

I'm sure Gentoo and Arch both have their forum. Maybe your could move to there?