Devuan's reason for existing has to do with Debian making retarded decisions on its users' behalf. If Systemd was an optional install and essential packages didn't depend on it, then all would have been well, but nope...

And, I think that's all Devuan needs to be: an actively maintained Debian without Systemd.

Why should it try to be anything else? I don't like most distros that are "designed" like Christmas lights and try to "reinvent the wheel" of Unix-like OSes. Let the individual decide how his or her system should be configured.

This mitigation guide resolves the above problems (i.e. "phoning home" and contacting Google). There's also a fork with placeholder title Web Browser that corrects much of Pale Moon's mistakes (e.g. automatic updates, add-on blacklists).

Does FluxBB support image attachments? That would make life a lot easier for people asking for or receiving support.

We're at a point where you can use Sid without worrying about something catastrophic underway, and even a bug or two could be patched up instantly. I think this argument would have been applicable ten years ago when GNU/Linux wasn't quite there yet with desktop adoption. It's a lot better now.

Still, if you're just looking to update as much as you can at least once a week, then expanding your repositories or moving over to a development branch would be ideal. Otherwise, if everything else looks fine, then why fix what isn't broken? That's the whole point of stable releases.

I know this is just going to derail the thread (I'll stop after this post, so make of it what you will), but I was more or less referring to how in the heck they are "popular", when I barely know any GNU/Linux user who has that OS as their daily driver, newbie or experienced. I could understand some exceptions, but the "number one on DistroWatch" thing just seems like a meme.

Also, isn't Systemd now included to some extent (source)?

Nonetheless, I appreciate the efforts of people like Steven Pusser who port and maintain packages not currently supported by Debian upstream.

By switching to Ceres. Way better and no less stable than Beowulf on a good day. Chimaera did give me problems, though. Perhaps the reality is LTS-based systems generally suck and rolling releases are the way to go. I like not having to worry about doing another major system upgrade ever again.

It's just a newbie's first distro that can then be used to level up to something else when it's time. What Ubuntu should've been (at the very least) and not nearly as much of a joke as Pop!_OS or the "popular" MX GNU/Linux.

I stuck with 18.3 for the longest time because I could still boot with Upstart (Systemd couldn't be removed successfully). I moved over to Devuan and "Mintified" it to the point where I don't even look back now.

Don't they use phpBB? By default, you can only "delete" your post if no one else followed up in the thread, and the previous posts which haven't had anyone else contributing are candidates for self-deletion. If you edit your most recent post in a thread (provided no one else replied), there won't be a brief note saying that you edited your post.

Both Chimaera and Ceres get you closer to upstream versions of software, so all the security updates can come directly from them.

I might switch to this soon. NetworkManager "mostly" works, and when it doesn't, it's a literal pain in the you-know-what.

Also, like one of the users above me, I'm using the "unstable" branch, hence dependency issues with Python (I asked about this here). Without Python, Youtube-dl wouldn't work, so what I did to mitigate this was I copied some of Python's binary files from a backup after properly removing all conflicting packages via APT. Jack and stuff like that are pretty much worthless in my book, since ALSA is more lightweight and just works.