I agree completely. I prefer to start over with a "clean slate". And my experience dist-upgrading Devuan (Refracta, actually) to a new major version has only served to reinforce that behavior.

The first time I tried this, the result was a totally trashed system that wouldn't even boot. That was several years ago. I briefly tried to repair the system, but my efforts seemed futile, so I ended up restoring the older system from a partition-image backup that I made just prior to the upgrade attempt.

More recently, I upgraded a Daedalus-based Refracta system to Excalibur. That worked, for the most part, and the system is usable. However, a few things did break, and they are still broken. Although I did try to troubleshoot and fix the main problem, my efforts led nowhere so I gave up. Since 99.99+% of the system is still usable, for my purposes, I didn't want to spend any more time trying to fix the parts that are broken.

For some old games, an alternative to WINE is to use DOSBox-X.

# apt update
# apt install dosbox-x

I am not sure what I would use it for, but I am tempted to install Windows for Workgroups 3.11 (WfW 3.11) on it. I have an old installation CD for that OS from my last place of employment.

If you haven't already, try again. This is most likely a temporary issue caused by mirrors not being in sync.

Android can be installed on a number of different devices besides phones. That being the case, one option would be to create an Android-based desktop-like system by installing LineageOS on something like a single-board computer (SBC) or a small Android TV box.

Check out the LineageOS wiki to see what kinds of devices it will run on:

https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/

Does bilibop use a lot of RAM? I've been planning to use it, but the thought just occurred to me that it might greatly increase the amount of RAM needed.

I think it would be wonderful if the LibreWolf developers could be persuaded to adopt this.

What is the output produced by this command?:

apt show intel-microcode

Flatpak is something that I had already decided that I am not going to use, and this development helps confirm that my decision was a good one.

A possible alternative to Flatpak is Nix, the package manager for NixOS. Although NixOS uses systemd, Nix can be made to work without it. For example, on Alpine Linux it works with OpenRC.

My experience is that lately (for last several years) I am always asked to enter a password when attempting to mount a partition on an internal drive using a file manager. The only exception to this that I have seen (so far) is when I use a file manager to mount a partition, formatted as VFAT or exFAT, that is located on a USB flash drive. I am not sure this has always been the case, but I'm not really certain about that.

If you frequently mount that sda7 partition, try adding it to your fstab file and configure it to be mounted automatically.

Thank you for mentioning CoreELEC. I learned about it a little over a year ago and more or less forgot about it. Now that you reminded me about it, I think I will buy a (relatively) cheap Amlogic-based Android TV box and install CoreELEC on it. Unless, of course, there is some other option that would be even better.

As for TVs, I have an old flat-screen TV that my sister gave me. It's not huge, but it's bigger than any computer monitor that I have ever used. And the reason I know that it's old is because it has a slew of RCA jacks on the back. I've never turned it on, so I don't even know if it works. I hope it does.

Alpine Linux has a lot of Lomiri packages, so apparently it is possible to run Lomiri without systemd.

https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/packages?name=lomiri*&branch=edge&repo=&arch=x86_64

I recall recently looking into CachyOS. As soon as I saw that it uses systemd, that was the end of that.