How are http://deb.devuan.org/merged/ and http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged different? Is one more "correct"?

http://deb.devuan.org/merged/ serves from a pool of http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged package mirrors (a 'round robin').  It is still being tested.

Nevertheless, since we are on the topic, this is my /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged/ ascii 			main
deb http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged/ ascii-security	main
deb http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged/ ascii-updates	main

How are http://deb.devuan.org/merged/ and http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged different? Is one more "correct"?

hmm-the version of mate I have is 1.16.2-2 if it matters.

I tried XFCE when I first switched to Devuan and found it just isn't as polished as MATE. For instance, I spent weeks patching Thunar and xfdesktop just to get basic niceties that I get out-of-the-box with Caja.

If/when MATE becomes contrib or non-free (or if it starts pushing me around and breaking my stuff like systemd), I will gladly give it the boot.

The mate power manager is a disgrace, everything is grayed out, none of the functions really work, I recommended it be dumped from the repo months ago.

Mate has really disappointed me in the last year, not only are longstanding bugs still not fixed, there are regressions now that are a big PITA. It's gotten way worse as they have progressed to GTK3, it's almost as bad as Gnome now, and with good reason as they are no longer anything like a fork of gnome 2, they are simply falling into line with the new gnome glitchware. It's embarassing really, windows 7 is more stable.

As I once said (over 5 years ago), Mate was a project started with Ubuntu "consumers" in mind. It was entirely founded on Ubuntu consumers making a lot of noise about "ubuntu classic" being discontinued (look it up).  It was never a "safe bet", it was always going to become what it has become today.

gnome was always a turd, it just got smellier as time went on...

gnome project will always embrace "technologies" such as polkit, dconf, mono and systemd.  For anyone not interested in technologies such as systemd, gnome always has been and always will be bad place to be.  Mate is just a gnome 2.x fork that's well past it's sell by date.

Xfce is better.  It has it's flaws, but still better - for now.  how long that will last who can say?

While "desktops" become more Linux centric and more reliant on "Linux proprietary" technology, that can only be a bad thing for free *nix and Linux distributions which do not use systemd.  This actually makes desktops, by their very nature, just a bad thing for anyone wanting to avoid all of the usual crap listed above (plus other cruft such as avahi and pulseaudio).

(I use OpenBSD exclusively.  I avoid desktops, except Xfce (for now), I don't used it (I use fluxbox), but tend to keep it installed for other users.)

1. Create /etc/acpi/events/lid-acpi-support with this in it:

event=button/lid
action=/etc/acpi/lid.sh

2. Create /etc/acpi/lid.sh with this in it:

#!/bin/sh

export DISPLAY=:0.0
normal_user=$(users | xargs -n1 | grep -v root | uniq)

if grep closed /proc/acpi/button/lid/*/state; then
	cat /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness >/tmp/brightness.save
	su $normal_user -c "xrandr --output LVDS-1 --off"
else
	su $normal_user -c "xrandr --output LVDS-1 --auto"
	cat /tmp/brightness.save >/sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness
fi

3. Make the script executable and restart acpid:

sudo chmod a+x /etc/acpi/lid.sh
sudo service acpid restart

The mate power manager is a disgrace, everything is grayed out, none of the functions really work, I recommended it be dumped from the repo months ago.

Mate has really disappointed me in the last year, not only are longstanding bugs still not fixed, there are regressions now that are a big PITA. It's gotten way worse as they have progressed to GTK3, it's almost as bad as Gnome now, and with good reason as they are no longer anything like a fork of gnome 2, they are simply falling into line with the new gnome glitchware. It's embarassing really, windows 7 is more stable.

Geoff

Is there a lightweight substitute? I'm looking for something that would merely turn off my display when laptop lid is closed, turn it back on when lid is opened.