You may want to contact kleiner_husar because he has done it already: https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=2120 Please send me a message if you know how to do it. It will give me a head start.

P.S. I am reading the Release Notes (better late than never) and I guess I was wrong about the default DM for KDE and LXQt.

XFCE: slim + consolekit
Cinnamon: lightdm + elogind
KDE: lightdm + elogind
LXQT: lightdm + elogind
MATE: slim + consolekit

Weird, sddm has been developed by the KDE and LXQt teams.

For me, Cinnamon worked with LXDM only. Lightdm has shutdown, restart buttons grayed out. Polkit issues.

That's not creepy or anything.  Hopefully you're not using this for a class on Orwellian literature lol.

Looks like it rejects VM usage of any sort, too.  I would hope your campus has some sort of virtual lab.

Also, if you do want to migrate sooner than later, it may be worthwhile to dump your spare configs in a separate partition or backup; bleach your system and install a preferred Devuan-based alternative; and then copy your backups wherever you desire (or keep that backup partition permanently mounted through /etc/fstab or whatever).

I've used the bunsenlabs netinstall script in the past, and it is pretty good. The difficulty is that systemd is more than a dependency, it is a necessity for much of BL to work. Hence, I think all I am up to is modifying the BL configs, and altering their pipe menus,

But I need to look at Star; it may fulfil my requirements without any need to alter things. I'll boot into the Star live iso later today, and have a good go at it, to find out.

I'll also post a question at the BL forums later, to see if anyone there has any ideas.

It might work with Devuan netinstall.

Also, W10 works really well in a virtual machine if you only need it for work.

I don't have access to these, and although johnraff or one of the other devs at BL  would probably be able to provide them, I have decided to purchase a larger SSD, and triple boot (Win 10,which I need for study), Devuan, and BL..

I won't be able to do this for a few weeks, but when I do I will have time to play with Devuan and get the type of set up I like---I'll need to do it this way, because life is full, and I am slow at this type of playing.

In the meantime, I'll continue reading documentation and the forum, to make it wasier when I get there.

Thanks all for your comments!

P.S. I am reading the Release Notes (better late than never) and I guess I was wrong about the default DM for KDE and LXQt.

XFCE: slim + consolekit
Cinnamon: lightdm + elogind
KDE: lightdm + elogind
LXQT: lightdm + elogind
MATE: slim + consolekit

Weird, sddm has been developed by KDE and LXQt teams.

There is a good thread over at that forum re running bunsenlabs systemd free which should give you some pointers.

https://forums.bunsenlabs.org/viewtopic.php?id=4939

In my opinion it would be better to install say one of the openbox distros the good folks here at Devuan host like Star, Miyo or Crows and just tweak them to work and feel like bunsenlabs by using the assets from bunsenlabs github like the themes and icons and configs etc.

https://github.com/bunsenlabs

EDIT: It appears that a fresh install may be the easiest way to go.

On LightDM and xfce, I have used them together in Debian, and all things being equal, they should be fine together surely.

Do not assume equal compatibility in Devuan as our backends are different to accommodate eudev.  Please read the Release Notes for clarification.

On LightDM and xfce, I have used them together in Debian, and all things being equal, they should be fine together surely.

I have read here (and on Debian forums) that XFCE does not work properly with lightdm. Since we only have two choices via the regular installer-iso (namely lightdm and sddm), I figured we should select the latter

XFCE works with LightDM, you just have to use/install elogind

apt-get install libpolkit-backend-elogind-1-0 

I have had no problem running LightDM and XFCE.

Wrong. Slim is the default DM for Xfce and works perfectly.  Did you have a problem with it?

I have read here (and on Debian forums) that XFCE does not work properly with lightdm. Since we only have two choices via the regular installer-iso (namely lightdm and sddm), I figured we should select the latter

I could not shut down nor restart the computer on my LXQt installed system via the lightdm login screen. I can with LXQt/sddm. I always choose the default display manager from now on.

I have had this issue since July with fr.deb.devuan.org on ascii. "Temporary error" "Cannot fetch this package" Nothing wong with pkgmaster so far.

I wish it were that easy. (It is not my computer.) 

Frankly, the live iso is the easiest way to go.