I have in fact heard that was a purpose for s6, to do systemd on a lightweight level.

better to have a piece of systemd as a dependency then the whole damn thing

Or, ya know, maybe admit that systemd does actually have some good points, and take inspiration and/or code from the things it does well.

Elogind works, it solves real-world problems, and it arrived at a time when the only alternative (consolekit) was an unmaintained mess nobody wanted to rely on if there was any other choice.

Now, we have more options. Turnstile and seatd are things, consolekit2 is actively maintained again. The situation might warrant reevaluation, for a number of valid technical reasons... Which "it's part of systemd, ick, kill it" is decidedly not.

BSD and other unixes had no choice, because removing all the linux-isms in [e]logind was arguably more work than fixing consolekit or implementing your own solution.

I think most on here would agree with that.

I know elogind is not systemD but comes to fill a gap systemD made.

Elogind is a part of systemd, forked and split out into a standalone daemon. Nothing more, nothing less, and nothing at all to do with "gaps".

I don't recommend switching to it if you expect to use synaptic without problems.

Wayland crap gets in the way preventing sudo synaptic.

Very irritating I must say.

Yes, I have been reading occasional blurbs about turnstile, and am hopeful regarding projects of that type.

I am certainly no IT expert, but I do have a lot of experience with Windows (required at my job) and with Linux OSes.  I have always felt more comfortable with Linux because its workings have traditionally been more understandable, providing me with less troubles and - when occasionally needed - relatively easy fixes, or alternatives. 

Unfortunately, over the past few years, it seems that the majority of Linux distros are becoming in many ways more and more like Windows -- that is, I have less and less options, the system seems convoluted and almost incomprehensible to a nonprofessional, and problem solving is more frequent and more difficult.  I understand that many professionals are pleased with the continuing integration of services within Linux, but for an amateur user like me, it brings back bad memories of trying to live with the Windows registry, complex update system, and so on.  One false move and I'm cooked.

I very much appreciate the enormous task being done by developers at antiX, Devuan, Void, PCLOS, Hyperbola, and others.  It certainly seems a huge mountain to climb.  Perhaps some collusion might be in order, despite some basic differences in the approaches being taken.

Thanks, again, for sharing your observations.

Agreed. PCLOS uses consolekit2 in place of elogind so that KDE, MATE, and Xfce work as intended but it sometimes requires heavy patches. For operating systems like FreeBSD, this is their only option when seat management is needed, but FBSD has far more port maintainers willing to make it happen. I can't blame the Devuan maintainers for not going any further than they have already, it takes baby steps with the kind of manpower they have. I unfortunately have no clue how to do Debian packaging, despite using Debian-based distros almost my entire time on Linux, or I would investigate making drop-in packages for elogind-dependent ones. :-)

Alternatively things like turnstile might make patching unnecessary in the future.

1) antiX does not use a full-blown desktop environment like Plasma or Xfce.  Instead, it gives you three window-manager options.  I use IceWM, and have found it easy to learn, easy to customize, and capable to meet all my needs.  I experimented with PCLOS, which also avoids elogind; but it uses Xfce, Mate, or Plasma.  I found that X would not run under Xfce unless Pulseaudio is installed.  I had more luck running Mate with plain ALSA, but had no way to pre-amp the sound for laptop speakers (ALSA plugin not available).  Anyway, I'm guessing that using a WM instead of a full-blown DE makes it easier to get around elogind.

2) Also, antiX has its own "nosystemd" repository (in addition to the Debian repos)
(http://mirrors.rit.edu/mxlinux/mx-packages/antix/bullseye bullseye/nosystemd amd64 Packages)
which reflects a tremendous amount of work by the lead developer in avoiding the complexities of systemd and its components.

I am very happy running antiX on my machines, whether ancient or squeaky new.  At boot, my ancient laptop is idling at around 150MB and is wicked fast.  And I use it on my newer boxes because it is so fast, flexible, and community sourced.

I always like to have a backup plan, though.  Devuan has been very reliable on one of my desktop boxes, and I hope the distro becomes increasingly successful.  The absence of the init from systemd is a real plus, but elogind seems to be the lion's share of systemd; so Devuan is not completely good old modular, flexible, economical Linux (yet).  It is asking a lot to work around elogind, as it has tentacles in so many key areas.  I was therefore surprised and excited to see the release notes for Daedalus mention the possiblity of avoiding elogind.   

Based on comments in this thread, it sounds like it will take some experimenting.  I'm going to try freeing up another machine for that purpose. 

Should anyone discover further clues, I would very much welcome their addition to this thread.

Thanks, again, for your responses.

$ ps -aux | grep seatd
root  - - - -  /usr/sbin/seatd -g video

$ id
... (sudo) .. (video) ..

Strange.. but after installing :libpam-ck-connector  i saw some progress.
I say 'strange' because i have not a clue what that package does..

Ok after also installing firmware-amd-graphics , i can start by $ sway

Now although sway runs ok when ever i try to install a file manager like pcmanfm , pcmanfm-qt, thunar , dolphin
i get 'libpam-ck-connector ' will be removed. And when that happens sway wont start.

I also installed 'greetd' but i dont know how to start the login gui screen.

But, I have tested the new Devuan 5.0 desktop-install iso and it worked perfectly.

:-)

I re-installed elogind and rebooted & everything is back...
I can use synaptic package manager (required a password dialog, at least)
I have sounds
I have all the restart and shutdown buttons (so I don't have to logout and ctrl+alt+del to restart)

I will try again next time I have a clean install.

First thing is to install dummy-logind (prevents most of the packages from being removed), consolekit, seatd, libck-connector0, libpolkit-gobject-consolekit-1-0, udevil (for user-level drive mounting without authentication, with devmon as the daemon you have to execute), and lxqt-sudo (for authentication).

Afterwards, you'll have to look for your packages' binary files that call upon Pkexec to some extent (e.g. Synaptic, Gufw, Timeshift, GSmartControl, GParted) and replace them all with LXQt's version. It's also a good idea to adjust your Polkit rules in /usr/share/polkit-1/.

If you start your Xfce session with Startx, then change your Xinit configuration file used to exec startxfce4 --with-ck-launch.