And I agree with some that it's time to close this thread.

Really...why did they leave?

I'd also mention that Devuan isn't filled with degenerate virtue-signalling commies that make it a significant side quest (at best) to hate on, police, and disparage (I'd imagine previously) significant portions of their userbase (White people, men, sexually normal/vanilla, non-commie, or any mixture of those in between).

If "anti-facist" registered child sex offenders like Jeremy Bicha (because, at least he's not a gasp n-n-natzeee am I right guys??) are still allowed to be a publically active, contributing member of Debian -- well then it makes perfect sense as to why people would no longer try to assist keep the trains chugging over there.

@camtaf greenjeans is probably saying that the best Debian devs where the ones that left Debian because of systemd and they moved on to create Devuan instead.

Bingo.

There is probably some truth to it, no experienced and self respecting dev with Unix background would put up with such an abomination that systemd is.

Debian has been steadily spiraling towards more issues, and the reason is:

All their best devs left them 10 years ago.

+1

Best,

A.

Been with Devuan since Ascii. This version 6 Excalibur is such a great representation of the extremely poor quality control of Devuan nowadays. What a flop. What a sh*t show.

It's not Devuan's fault, Devuan is unsystemded Debian.

Good luck. All linuxes are going down and not only linuxes. You'll not find better. Or may be for just specific use case on specific hardware. May be try void, artix, antix, mx, ... bsd... but it's possible that you'll back. Pclinux did not support qemu/KVM (may be now?), alpine is complicated for advanced desktop setup, chimera linux will become systemd.

I do understand the frustration of the OP but IMO his gripe about the QA should have been directed to Debian 13. Devuan simply has not got the manpower to do the the QA-Management for Trixie.

All the problems I had with upgrading to Excalibur had their root in the rather shoddy Trixie release, for example: in the dkms-pkg the 'recommend' for the linux-header-pkg was dropped which obviously resulted in failed compiles of some dkms-based modules. As an Orca user I had a few other niggles to sort out.

Considering the invasive nature of systemd and some other big changes introduced in Trixie I personally think the Devuan Dev-Team did rather well.

Well stated and true.

All the problems I had with upgrading to Excalibur had their root in the rather shoddy Trixie release, for example: in the dkms-pkg the 'recommend' for the linux-header-pkg was dropped which obviously resulted in failed compiles of some dkms-based modules. As an Orca user I had a few other niggles to sort out.

Considering the invasive nature of systemd and some other big changes introduced in Trixie I personally think the Devuan Dev-Team did rather well.

We were pleading on channels for users to test this and that. The lack of response is not the fault of the developers.

So, I'm not the most involved user, but this is the first time I'm hearing about this. At the risk of making an off-topic comment - please think of ways to allow users to hear those pleas better. Some users - especially those, like me, who live on the testing version mostly - would not mind running some tests and giving feedback occasionally. Just saying.

Anyway, about the initial post - I have not experienced a shit-show nor flops nor anything like that. In your position I would start with a post saying "here are issues I have experienced with Excalibur: Foo and Bar and Baz. Are these known common issues? Are they inherited from Debian?" etc. - then, if others also mention seeing that, and you don't get any appropriate responses, you may consider turning on the expletives and derogatory rhetoric...

In Debian yes, not in the derivatives, unless the derivate in question is intentionally and by design, based on the Debian testing and/or unstable branches (e.g. Ubuntu) and has the manpower and financial backing to oversee a project on the scale of Debian.  Based on this, it has already gone past that stage of "quality control" and the Devuan maintainers/packagers are only focused on systemd removal, as I understand it?

"stable" in the Debian sense means "unchanging", it doesn't mean bug free.  Debian releases, go out with bugs, and receive continual updates until the release is EoL.

It's impossible to QC everything, as it's impossible to QC everything in FreeBSD ports, for example.  Many packages lack maintainers, etc...

The most noticeable problem was the CPU Graph plugin for Xfce kept crashing and had to be removed. I'm not sure why, and haven't had time to investigate this issue yet.

I may have also found a serious problem in one of Debian's packages -- a security-related program never starts because no configuration file was installed when the package was installed. I will refrain from naming the software until I've investigated further. Perhaps this was just a fluke caused by the system being in a transitional state when I attempted to reinstall the package.