My personal preference is to remove pulseaudio as soon as I notice that it's installed (or do a more controlled installation of the system and make sure it doesn't get installed in the first place.)

Sadly, it's a dependency of Mate....sucks, for a DE that forked because of the garbageware that Gnome had become, it seems ridiculous and counterintuitive (not to mention counter-productive) that it :

a: requires the pulse crap
b: continues to rely completely on dconf, more crap, what kind of trying-to-be-a-closed-source-weenie thinks it's a great idea to use binary config files in userspace?
c: is now going all gtk3, which is currently pretty crappy and looks to be getting worse

Mate is regressing instead of forking. I think it's time to fork Mate into something useable without all this Gnome/Redcrap pottyware.

As per my Volume Up, Volume Down and Mute keys not working Topic there is a mixture of Alsa and pulseaudio software installed. Will this apulse package fix the problems I have noted in that topic?

Can I add the following to the /etc/apt/sources.list file

deb http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/devuan experimental main

... to point to the following location?

http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/devuan/di … ary-amd64/

Can I do this before installing rsyslog and upgrading to ascii?

Thanks, MTB.

Apulse is used to satisfy dependency on pulseaudio without having pulseaudio installed. I don't know if it will help your volume key problem. Add the deb line to sources.list and then install with

apt-get update
apt-get -t experimental install apulse

I would do this before upgrading to ascii. You have a better chance of identifying the source of any problems by changing one thing at a time. My personal preference is to remove pulseaudio as soon as I notice that it's installed (or do a more controlled installation of the system and make sure it doesn't get installed in the first place.)

Consider Wire - end-to-end encryption, respecting privacy; GPL3 Freed Open-Source Software.

I'll look into this app later, thanks!

If you're not using pulseaudio and don't want to use it, install apulse first. it's in devuan repos now. (in experimental)

I've used retroshare in the past. I don't know their current state. It uses gpg keys for authentication.

Are there any alternatives that can connect with people who are using skype?

As per my Volume Up, Volume Down and Mute keys not working Topic there is a mixture of Alsa and pulseaudio software installed. Will this apulse package fix the problems I have noted in that topic?

Can I add the following to the /etc/apt/sources.list file

deb http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/devuan experimental main

... to point to the following location?

http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/devuan/di … ary-amd64/

Can I do this before installing rsyslog and upgrading to ascii?

Thanks, MTB.

I've used retroshare in the past. I don't know their current state. It uses gpg keys for authentication.

Are there any alternatives that can connect with people who are using skype?

https://web.skype.com/

Is there a package for Skype somewhere?

Thanks, MTB.