What medium did you install from for the netbook? ie; live cd, netintsall, dvd set etc?

Tried livecd, but it didn't allow me to use xfs as fs option. However, both desktop/dvd set and netinstall did fail in the same way.

Give it a try, but make sure you are able to backup and recover in case it doesn't work.

Sure!

I had many problems installing Devuan on my (old) netbook and after several failed (e.g. like this one) attempts (uefi, bios/gpt), the only combination which worked was bios/mbr...I almost gave it up since e.g. mxlinux was installing fine on the same machine.

I've updated to Ceres, replaced Slim with lightdm and wicd with nm to make it easier for my other family members. Now I'll play for some time to see how everything does work before attempting to do inplace-migration of my desktop machine.

I would ignore installing wicd-gtk as it is only in stable for devuan i believe. Maybe try connman-gtk instead. Im not sure if this matters though as wicd-gtk is still in debian experimental. One can always manually connect using wpa_supplicant and ifupdown as long as these are configured before the conversion.

I'm running Xfce under Debian Sid and, after sorting out some problems with Devuan on my spare (netbook) machine, I'd like to migrate my desktop to Devuan as well. Now, in the docs there is info how to migrate from "stable" from Debian to Devuan, so I wonder what do you think about doing the same for "unstable" which could save me quite some time or is it better/recommended to do fresh-install, update to Ceres and then do restoration work?