@stultumanto No idea why, but that was easier to do in doas for me.

Honestly, my use of sudo is 100% inertia at this point. The fact that doas comes from OpenBSD is all the endorsement I need. I'll probably check it out if I ever get a free moment!

I think the syntax was just trickier for me is all. doas syntax is much simpler is all.

%sudo    ALL=NOPASSWD:    /sbin/shutdown,/sbin/poweroff,/sbin/reboot

Then add yourself to the sudo group:

usermod -aG sudo your_username

Now you can reboot without a password prompt:

sudo reboot

This is my preferred method, as a member of the nonsensical hair-shirt brigade! (I don't even use a display manager, just good old xinit.)

Does this work without root permissions?

Logind manages resources for interactive logins/physical "seats", and replaces the likes of consolekit for managing access to devices and executing privileged tasks on behalf of the user.
So yes, you can ask logind to do things like shut down the machine without sudo/being root - so long as logind knows you are logged in to a physical session ("seat"). You can do the same over e.g. ssh, but in that case it will ask you to authenticate.

I finally did it by installing elogind.  Doing further research, I found that there's also something else I had to do -- run the following command after installing the base Devuan CD:

sudo update-rc.d elogind defaults

I then changed the commands in the IceWM preferences file for rebooting and shutting down to loginctl reboot, loginctl suspend, and loginctl poweroff, which still didn't work.  I then checked later, and found that I forgot to uncomment them. LOL

But once I discovered that oversight on my part about the uncommenting, I tried them again, AND THEY WORKED!!!

Thanx, y'all!

Now, to FINALLY get around to customizing it to my specifications and make the public announcement of the new release later this week.  I'm PUMPED!

Choice of init/rc makes very little difference to shutdown/reboot invocation, and none at all to suspend (unless you have some init scripts wired up to suspend/resume hooks ofc).

I was speaking in general probably. I don't know how to do any services with regular sysvinit. So there's that

Does this work without root permissions? Also I wonder to myself if elogind has root permissions built in. Not saying one way or the other though. Because I have no clue.

If so, curious.. But doas is still easier than sudo in my experience. Can't say anything about elogind tho

the doas method isn't hard though and is easier than the sudo one if anyone hasn't used sudo's method which I never have due to there being so much clutter in it.

I couldn't figure out how to do stuff the way doas does in sudo

But yeah, etlogind probably is easier, although I have never used that method.

You can shutdown or reboot with ease. It's got a very well developed version of ICE.

It's still based on Bookworm but it has an outstanding GUI for package management - far better than synaptic it's the same one used by MX Linux.

As root, I copied the menu and preferences files from /usr/share/icewm to /etc/X11/icewm and edited these two lines in preferences:

#  Command to reboot the system.
From
# RebootCommand="test -e /run/systemd/system && systemctl reboot || sudo -n /sbin/reboot"
To
RebootCommand="sudo shutdown -r now"

and 

#  Command to shutdown the system.
From
# ShutdownCommand="test -e /run/systemd/system && systemctl poweroff || sudo -n /sbin/poweroff"
To
ShutdownCommand="sudo shutdown -h now"

NOPASSWORD lines for reboot and shutdown were already in /etc/sudoers so those two cmds in IceWM's menu worked. Same results had ~/.icewm been created with the edited preferences file. My system isn't set up for hibernate but when the line for it in preferences is edited, it should work.

I recommend you use openrc + sysvinit rather than just pure sysvinit.

Choice of init/rc makes very little difference to shutdown/reboot invocation, and none at all to suspend (unless you have some init scripts wired up to suspend/resume hooks ofc).

Suspend / hibernation has nothing to do with "hardware keys", beside the latter often being assigned to trigger such through ACPI button events.

Actually suspending the system is kernel functionality (usually with firmware help for bootstrapping a suspended system), with optional high-level interfaces (pm-utils etc.).
Those can be called however you like, be it a dedicated (i.e. pre-assigned) "hardware" key, remapping a "hardware" key with acpid, a custom key combination in X / whatever DE you use (I like meta+s), or a script / menu / whatever.

You'd set those up the same way as you ever would when writing to sysfs or running any other priveliged command. Sudo / doas / groups / suid / polkit / logind are all a matter of taste for giving normal users permission.

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In general, I'd suggest [e]logind as  being the most convenient / compatible. I don't see any real reason for not wanting a login/seat manager of some kind on a primarily desktop/GUI setup, and it's also the easiest way to get X running as not-root (i.e. providing dynamic permissions for the nodes in /dev/ X needs)...
Unless of course you're going for knee-jerk "but it comes from systemd, no way" idological nonsense or hair-shirt level "minimalisim", in which case figuring out how you want to do seat management and permissions is up to you.

This will be much easier to handle. I have experience with this.

reboot and shutdown however are fairly easy for me.

if you know how to set up doas, you can shutdown by using:

doas poweroff
doas reboot

as for suspend, I am not sure how you would do that in devuan, without hardware keys. So... yeah lol, I draw a blank there.

If you set up doas properly though, you can just type those two commands in and it goes off immediately without requiring a password.

EDIT: If you want an easier way to shutdown though, qshutdown also works flawlessly.by hitting now on the menu and you will powerdown.

all needed for icewm would be to make a local copy of the included power menu entry and replace the systemd commands with the corresponding systemact command.