I know XFCE is Devuan default, but the Thunar file manager has left me wanting: no search, and more.

I found and came to like XFE running under XFCE, but XFE isn't allowing multiple applications to open a file type, and isn't even storing just one application as per the associate link it does offer. Not enough joy for me.

I recently left KDE because the new Plasma 5 icons are just too bland and painful to deal with (just because M$ does it, doesn't mean everyone in the computing world should chase M$ as a lead). That said, I miss KDE Dolphin quite a bit.

So, mostly because I had toyed with a distro that uses Mate as default and I was a little familiar with Mate from that experience, I installed Mate on Devuan 1.0.0.

I like Mate quite a bit, Caja does almost everything I need from a file manager.

A problem I need help with is as follows:
I use USB Flash drives quite a bit. Like constantly. Nothing stays on the spinning disc for very long.

When I insert a flash stick, it pops up on the Mate desktop, which is just perfect.
When I double click the flash stick desktop icon, it opens Caja, again, just perfect.

When I'm done my not so mysterious work on my flash stick, I close Caja.
I wait a few seconds.
Sometimes, I have a terminal window open, sometimes I don't. Sometimes when I have a terminal window open, I will issue a sync command to flush cached writes. Sometimes I do not issue sync, sometimes I sync as root. Syncing makes no difference in the long run.
Whether or not I issue a sync command, I then right click the desktop icon for the flash stick, and I select eject.

The desktop icon disappears, no messages are displayed telling me it is safe to remove the flash stick.

I pull the flash stick out because I'm done. I later reinsert it, and if I don't already have a terminal open, I will open a terminal, issue su, login in as root, and issue a dmesg | tail to see the flash stick /dev association point.

I then issue fsck -p /dev/sdx, and much to my surprise, the dirty bit was set, and the file system needed repairs.

But.... as I stated, I can issue a sync command before the eject command, I always get a dirty bit, yet I expect that either of sync or the eject command should have safely prepared the flash stick for removal.

Seems it makes no difference if I issue sync as user, issue sync as root, or never issue sync at all. That alone stumps me.

These are almost stock flash sticks except I repartition them to NOT have a partition at all, and I mkfs a fat filesystem into the unpartitioned device. Such has worked for a decade and more than a half dozen distros so far....

Anyone know what I'm doing wrong here?

(And a gentle "Oh, by the way": Mate released 1.18.0 not very long ago in March 2017; Devuan offers Mate 1.8.1, from 2014-ish. Maybe the intervening changes have fixed the dirty bit issue?)

Thanks for any assistance!

Ok, NOW I need some direction!

Having a great experience on my Dell laptop with Jesse RC1, I dusted off my desktop box, I have reformatted and repartitioned the drive, and then I went for the big switch to Jesse 1.0.0 official.

From many lessons learned, the first thing I do after a fresh distro install is to update the packages, using Synaptic (Synaptic - such a great tool).

So, after getting Jessie installed on my eMachines AMD64X2, and seeing it boot and login and surf properly, I dropped into automatic mode and launched Synaptic.

I gave root password, and when Synaptic settled, I clicked reload to refresh the package lists.

Synaptic then gave me a blank stare, so to speak. Nothing happened. I'm posting from the same session where Synaptic was unable to update package lists, so my network is running ok. After a bit, I got this error message:

Failed to fetch http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/merged/dists/jessie/InRelease  
Failed to fetch http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/merged/dists/jessie-updates/InRelease  
Failed to fetch http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/merged/dists/jessie-security/InRelease  
Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.

I'm guessing those repositories aren't available at the moment? Or am I in need of selecting a repository setup outside of these 3?
If the latter is the correct answer, then I'll also need some idea how to properly reconfigure the repos via synaptic.

TYVVM.

Thanks, it has been a long time since first installs weren't horridly complex and I've installed distros hundreds of times, on a lot of legacy hardware since using my first distro in 1998, Red Hat 4.0. Devuan development has produced a stunner as of RC2, and I'm hoping to be using Devuan for a long time.

Told my buddies at USAlug.

ttyl!