Personally, I am very grateful to those who manage to keep Linux as it was meant to be, I'm not a programmer, but I know programming is non trivial.

That is why I try to help in these & other forums, it is my way of giving something back to the community, in a way that I am able.

If it weren't for the likes of AntiX & Devuan, I would have gone over to the BSDs full time a while ago, when systemd arrived on the scene, but thanks to the programmers that though like myself, I am still able to use a familiar O/S.....

Also, if it wasn't for people setting up & maintaining forums such as here, where would we even be able to discuss our preferred O/S, so my thanks also go to our forum maintainers....

Devuan uses the Debian repositories for everything except systemd related software.

Depending on how deep you intend going, but O'Reilly Server Hacks 1 & 2 might fit the bill, otherwise, perhaps, The Linux Command Line might suit.

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/li … 596004613/

https://www.linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php (Downloadable as a free PDF)

Probably, most of your ram is just being used as a cache.....

If you were to include derivatives, it is quite a bit higher than 4.45%.

(Android tablets & phones, for instance.)

Devuan installs to either MBR or UEFI, so it will be that your laptop needs to be set to boot from external USB before internal disk.

Never liked the idea of The Cloud, nor pushed updates, & this outage just proves my point...

Maybe that's why they are talking immutable systems....

I have no, (have not had),  problems online using Virgin, through their router, so would suspect it is something with your routing - other than that, I can't help.

Ever since the introduction of Chromebooks, I've seen the quality of laptops decline; so much so that I don't use one anymore, just desktop types of the SFF/USFF type, with a decent screen/monitor, & a decent mouse/keyboard.

I run Devuan/XFCE on an old 2011 HP G62, i3 processor, 4GB ram, with an 80GB HDD, without any problems...

(I'd think that you could run any desktop you like with that amount of ram.)

Maybe you don't know about these images - https://arm-files.devuan.org/RaspberryP … %20Builds/