At a quick guess you are American & do not understand English humour, so I will give you a pass on that.

Hmm. How about this one:

$ apt search Leafpad
Sorting... Done
Full Text Search... Done
l3afpad/stable 0.8.18.1.11-4 amd64
  Simple text editor forked from Leafpad
$ grep ^[^#] /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/*
/etc/apt/sources.list:deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus                  main non-free-firmware non-free contrib
/etc/apt/sources.list:deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-updates          main non-free-firmware non-free contrib
/etc/apt/sources.list:deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-security         main non-free-firmware non-free contrib
/etc/apt/sources.list:deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-proposed-updates main non-free-firmware non-free contrib
/etc/apt/sources.list:deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-backports        main non-free-firmware non-free contrib
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/josm.list:deb https://josm.openstreetmap.de/apt/ alldist universe

rclone update

I've installed and have been making intensive efforts to get to grips. It describes itself as "equivalent to rsync" and is supposed to be native for Dropbox (and many other similar).

I've hit a huge issue: rclone copy appears to have the effect of deleting almost all of my dropbox. Yikes.

I cannot show the live results since I do not want to delete most of my Dropbox again. However, here is the size of the current files. After the second command (which I stopped after a little while) there were less than 1,000 files left. I'm uncertain of the reason why. I had to fix by re-uploading via a browser page, and that means a complete 1.5GB upload.

(In the code that follows I have replaced the actual remote Dropbox + remote path + local dir with generic names; -P==show Progress; the filter file is to NOT upload certain files)

$ rclone size remote:path --tpslimit 12 --tpslimit-burst 0
Total objects: 3.401k (3401)
Total size: 1.468 GiB (1576509174 Byte)
$ rclone copy local-dir remote:path -P --filter-from filter-file.txt

I'm not going to be able to use rclone. I assume that it is something that I'm doing wrong, but my Hearings will be soon now & I cannot afford to suddenly lose all of the content of every Dropbox. In addition, I do not have the time to report the error, nor research the reason.

Sounds very intelligent to me, Steve (although I never run pipewire).

The process to change Debian repository choices is (from my recall) identical to that deployed with Devuan. I think that his problem lies elsewhere, rolfie.

@boughtonp:
Thanks for rclone notice (yup, supports Dropbox natively). Looks like the kind of option I was looking for. Have downloaded & will be using it in anger soonish, soon as I get to grips with help.

Added Fri 19:
This morning I spotted a tit (small bird, not certain of specie) jumping around the branches of the large Cherry tree outside my bedroom window. Yesterday my near neighbour informed me that he had spotted blackbirds eating apples fallen onto a garden shed not visible from my windows. So, the future for the acre + birdsong looks more hopeful than I had previously thought.

Those birds all manage to fly across the Channel, so I guess that they should be tough enough to survive a few cold nights.

You are sounding a bit whiny there, Steve.

It's not a question of whose time is more valuable. The Court expects participants to use Dropbox - my first use, and not my decision. I thought that it may also be useful for others if Devuan becomes an option in addition to Debian & Ubuntu. I would love to get involved, and also in lots of other things as well. I just cannot, so put it out there. It's not a demand. It is a request (oh! horror!).

Well, with 80 views in 24 hours that is, of course, a near certainty (if this not obviously irony, then consider that I am a mod at SFS and in mid-December the Stats Page reported 2m queries daily; now that gets close to a DDOS).

Thanks for the Berlios link. Reviewing my dmesg output I spotted that it was a UVC camera (have never come across that before):

[481614.064887] usb 1-1.3: Found UVC 1.00 device USB 2.0 Camera (1bcf:2cc9)

An API is not a driver.

In my reading I notice many mentions of laptops with builtin webcams. If one of those is supplied with Linux (unlikely, I would have thought) then it would come with a driver that would utilise the V4L API. Otherwise not.

The main problem with cheap devices for Linux is not the driver but the way that so much (so-called) hardware-processing is actually off-loaded to the local CPU rather than handled by the hardware. That is the reason for so much "non-free firmware" in the apt sources.list. The dirty secret that is not mentioned there is that this is actually 'non-free firmware-originally-designed-for-Windows'.

You can see some of what I'm talking about in this PDF about modems & DSPs ("Digital Signal Processing"). On Page 9.3 it states:

(DSPs are also used in sound processing)

The point of that paragraph is that DSP's are supposed to be specialised hardware chips contained within the modem. But no - that is too expensive. So instead the modem contains a cheap EEPROM which loads external firmware, and that causes the modem to use the local laptop cpu to run the DSP algorithms. Now, in the 1990s when this was all first originated there was ONLY Windows firmware, and Linux & Mac & all other OS had to go hang themselves. Now, after 25 years, we do actually have some firmware grudgingly provided (but no code, so it is non-free). Also, all updates arrive at Windows first.

But, it seems that my web-cam actually contains all necessary hardware. Hooray!

Note #1:
Both the Amazon product link + img link in post#1 come from my browser history in buying this product. Please report if either fails for you so that I can search out generic links to replace them.

Note #2:
The gov.uk CVP page should be available for non-UK visitors. I'm less certain whether the try-it-out-live page linked on that page will work for non-UK folks. Do drop a post here stating whether either worked for you.

Note #3:
I came across Guvcview, which is a useful UVC-based utility to check a webcam which also has snapshot/record video buttons. It is available in the repository:

$ apt search Guvcview
Sorting... Done
Full Text Search... Done
guvcview/stable,now 2.0.8-2 amd64 [installed]
  GTK+ base UVC Viewer

libguvcview-2.1-2/stable,now 2.0.8-2 amd64 [installed,automatic]
  GTK+ base UVC Viewer - runtime

libguvcview-dev/stable 2.0.8-2 amd64
  GTK+ base UVC Viewer - development files