I hear that comment a lot when it comes to wayland, doesn't inspire much confidence.

I don't know what issues xfce might have, but if Devuan is considering using a different default desktop, my vote goes to MATE. The vanilla test iso's i've been making of excalibur with mate are very nice and seem to run really well. And it uses the theme elements properly. It's simple and stable, no CSD shenanigans with it's native apps, and they have been pretty fast to fix any bugs despite being over-worked, underpaid, and short-staffed (kinda like us here, lol).

^^^ yeah I have the gnome-disk-utility too, handy program but just really a one-trick pony for me, and doesn't even do that right. That's what i've spent the last couple days on, writing a script so I can get rid of it.

I typically use it after using Mintstick to create a liveUSB, only thing bad about it is that it creates one single ISO-9660 partition that takes up the entire stick regardless of size. The disk utility however can be used to create a secondary partition in whatever flavor you choose, I use FAT32 and just make it a data partition to store files I want to carry along with the liveUSB.

But it still doesn't do that right, it leaves ISO-9660 signatures on the new partition, therefore if you try to view the stick in Gparted it won't show your new partition, it still thinks it's one gigantic ISO-9660 partition. It still works, no issues there, but it's been bugging me, so I fixed it. So now I have a nice quick script to run after using Mintstick that takes the empty space and creates the partition I want.

I could actually tell the gnomers how to fix their app now, but I doubt they'd even admit there's a flaw, probably blame it on Gparted. Not that Gparted doesn't need a little work too, it does.

But the worst thing about the disk utility, is it refuses to use SSD properly, and so looks just ridiculous with it's superfluous set of min-max-close buttons and such. Their gtk4 apps are even worse, they don't even use the basic colors from your theme, and don't allow a titlebar at all, it's really bizarre how bad their designs are when it comes to look-and-feel.

Dumping a lot of their crap from my projects this week.

It doesn't do squat, I ran for months on a system where the password for gnome-keyring (which SHOULD be the users password) was in fact not the correct users password, but an artifact left over because I didn't delete the keyring files before/after running a snapshot. I still don't know what password it was using.

But during all that time, no issues with the system whatsoever. It was in fact, not doing a damn thing except for generating a "User's keyring did not get unlocked on login" message whenever I opened the browser. And that warning didn't mean anything because all you have to do is hit cancel and ignore it, then browse normally. Or add an extra command to the browser exec command to stop the warnings (which is what most people do).

It was supposed to be securely storing the users passwords that you save when browsing, but even if configged with the right password it did not in fact do that either, they were being stored still by the browser in it's section in config.

I un-installed it, and no issues in several months since I did so. Only issue I had was I tried uninstalling the pkcs package too, but my music player Exaile (a gnome app of course) refused to connect to internet radio until I re-installed it.

Yeah, brilliant that, everybody should have to have permission from gnome before they are allowed to listen to the f*****g radio. derp.

But on the bright side, i've spent the last 3 days creating an app that will allow me to dump even more buggy gnome crap from my machine, so i'm pretty stoked about that.

@golinux, while snaps and flatpaks are just crap, I have had some success using Appimages, they work pretty well for us "pointy-clicky" folk.

Palemoon is a good browser, but their terms of redistribution are why they aren't in anybody's repo I think.

Brave works pretty well all by itself as a daily browser, it's own adblocker seems to work good enough.

When you get a sec, would love to hear how you did that!

5-16-2025

New versions of the ob-max and mini, updated packages and a lot of work. Added
support for flac to the max, added support for thumbnailing, caching, and viewing
JPEG-XL (.jxl) image files to both with some updated packages from the libjxl
author on github, these are much newer than the old libjxl that's in daedalus,
but still made specifically for this version. Can't add them to the right-click
image re-sizing and rotating scripts as the version 6 of Imagemagick that's onboard
doesn't support the format, that will come in version 7 (excalibur-trixie).

Tons of small fixes and optimizations, and fixed a longstanding bug in the
"Open folder as root" extension that was offering to open more than just the
inode/directory folders. Made a new .desktop in /usr/share/applications that works
correctly on only folders, only difference is it's higher towards the top of the
right-click context menu.

Will work on the Vuu-do mate-mini next, should be up in a few days.

Have a great weekend!
~greenjeans

^^Is kinda what it sounds like, OP did mention that he had "a couple of gb" left, if he's only got a couple GB left on any kind of modern drive, then he has a LOT of files on that drive. Even my my ancient laptop from 2012 has a 350 gb hard-drive.

It's all actually a hella lot easier using Synaptic instead of typing sudo over and over again.

Synaptic
reload
mark all upgrades, apply
search for usrmerge, mark for installation, apply
close and reboot
alter sources.list
Synaptic
reload
mark all upgrades, apply
close and reboot
done.

5-09-2025 Updated versions of Vuu-do Openbox mini and max, and also the Mate-mini uploaded

A number of package upgrades including Chromium and network-manager and more. I
changed up some colors to better match the theme, mainly the panel background to
bring all versions up to date with the same colors. Fixed some late-night fat-fingering
I did when upgrading some of the extensions for PcmanFM, and added support for the
archive manager (engrampa) to extract .rar archives. And some general housekeeping,
deleted some superfluous things and fixed a duplicate menu entry.

Did some nice work with the max, using about 10% less ram at idle than it was for previous versions.
Really happy with how far this project has come since I picked it back up last year.

Perhaps just a note after their entries that they are no longer maintained?

MIYO and Star were a couple of the first to adopt Devuan, so they have some historical significance as they were there at the beginning of this amazing experience.

MIYO especially has meaning for a lot of folks, his thread in this section has over 380,000 views.

On a personal note, all of my projects from 2017-2025 have their start as re-spins of Miyolinux, I still have a copy of the original iso that really blew me away and set me to thinking even more outside the (Open) box. The philosophy of Make It Your Own still guides me to this day and I strive to make it easy for folks to do just that every time I sit down in front of the keyboard.

Update 5-02-2025 - Updated Vuu-do 5.03 Openbox versions uploaded.

Some package updates, a new kernel, more cosmetic fixes in several programs,
and an upgraded thumbnail-cacher script that adds parallel-processing of thumbnails,
got a nice 35% boost in speed from that, also has some better error handling and
optimization. And I fixed an issue with locales, and did some additional optimizing.

Working on the mate-mini now, should have that up in the next couple days.

Yep. In Snapshot it works great on Excalibur, ran a lot of iso's with it now. Haven't tried Refracta2usb on excalibur yet, just Daedalus stuff.