I don't know anything about zfs, but I can answer a few of your questions. I did ask someone who uses zfs to take a look at this thread, and he suggests using partitions instead of whole disk for zfs. There is no longer a performance hit for using partitions.

/home separate from the OS partition is a good idea for several reasons. You are less likely to fill up '/' if you keep your user's files separate. It can also make reinstall easier.

swapfile works fine in devuan.
I use the following to make a 256MiB swapfile:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/path/to/swapfile bs=1024 count=262144
mkswap /path/to/swapfile

Change the count if you want a bigger swapfile. Add it to fstab to use it.
Swap is not necessary. You can boot and run the system without it as long as you have enough RAM. (You obviously do have enough.)

I recommend using a separate /boot partition. In ascii, it's possible to have the /boot directory as part of an encrypted root partition, but that doesn't work in beowulf. (Maybe it will by the time you want to upgrade, but that's a guess.)
Note: the /boot partition is not the same as the efi partition.

I've never used parted to make gpt partitions, but I think it should work. Gparted should also work. I usually do it with gdisk.

The desktop-live iso won't give you what you want. It installs a full XFCE desktop. Use one of the Installer isos. Netinstall iso, CD-1 or DVD will work.

Putting it in ~/.bash_profile didn't work for me. I suppose I have to log out of my desktop session and restart it. Putting it in ~/.bashrc works every time I open a new terminal on the desktop. If I put it in /root/.bashrc, it works every time I do 'su' or 'su -' in a terminal.

After doing some test runs, I think I know why you got a zero byte iso - if you use any of the build tasks other than "1. Create a snapshot" you have to edit the config file to set save_work=yes. Otherwise, there's nothing to re-squash or re-pack into an iso file.

These two lines from the log suggest that you stopped it in the middle of a previous run, and /tmp/extracted didn't get deleted. I was able to reproduce these errors, but I did not get any input/output errors, and I did get a normal sized iso.

mkdir: cannot create directory ‘/tmp/extracted’: File exists

cpio: kernel/x86/microcode/AuthenticAMD.bin not created: newer or same age version exists
62 blocks

(Note to self: add /tmp/extracted to the cleanup function.)

Check your hard disk health.

As root:
smartctl -a /dev/sda

(you may need to install smartmontools)

A video of your file manager showing /var/log is not helpful.

Run
nc termbin.com 9999 < /var/log/refractainstaller.log
and then give me the link.

or send the log to me in email. (my screen name at gmail dot com)

That's the default setting now.

I've been running beowulf with static IP set in /etc/network/interfaces since the beginning of the year. Configure it in the interfaces file or use a network manager (like wicd) but don't do both - they may fight with each other.

sgage: volumeicon-alsa if you can't find what you're looking for. (I assume you aren't using pulseaudio, which has its own volume control - pavucontrol)

I've gotten this message trying to install grub in a chroot. It goes away in a couple minutes. I'm unable to reproduce it by booting the live-iso from usb.

Yes, you can create your own live-iso with refractasnapshot, and then install from the live media with refractainstaller.

Documentation is here:
https://refracta.org/documents.html

gvfs, gvfs-common, gvfs-daemons and gvfs-libs should all have been installed with the desktop.
gvfs-backends does not get installed automatically. That's just the way the dependencies are set up. I could easily add that to the desktop-live, but adding it to the default netinstall would be a lot more work.

Stable release will happen when we're satisfied that all the installer media are good. If you're wondering when to upgrade from ascii, you don't need to wait. All of our forked packages for beowulf are done.

lsb-release does get included in the default desktop install.

And for those who care:

apt purge pulseaudio avahi-daemon
apt autoremove

is easy.

I think you're right about nano missing. I noticed that in testing some earlier builds, and I forgot about it because I was troubleshooting something else. We should be able to add that.

Stop calling it UTC time. That's not what it is. It's local time.

The very first code block in your first post is correct. The hwclock command is doing exactly what the man page says it does. It's showing you the local time and your local offset from UTC in both cases.

One shows the correct local time because you gave the hwclock accurate information, and the other shows the incorrect local time because you gave the hwclock command incorrect information.

hwclock --utc
2020-02-29 02:15:50.889268+03:00
hwclock --localtime
2020-02-28 23:16:54.311448+03:00

You're welcome to contact the author(s) of hwclock and ask them to change the behavior of the command, but I doubt they'll change it.