What a truly horrifying idea.

If you really want to break your system, nothing much has changed recently regards apt-pinning and /etc/apt/preferences still works.

Personally I use something like

Package: *
Pin: release n=<release codename>
Pin-Priority: 1

If I need something from another release.
But that something is going to be a small package with no major dependencies, and I'm going to watch apt like a hawk to make sure nothing else gets pulled in... because I like my system non-borked. I expect trying it with a behemoth like gnome would be a total disaster.

To be fair, it was one of the budget BX series. They're cheap for a reason and the specs are mostly lies.
I already had a good rant about them here, so I won't repeat it.

On an SSD, probably not, assuming you're using a non-exotic filesystem. On a mechanical HDD, the traditional reasons for using a swap partition are avoiding fragmentation (and thus expensive head seeks) and the ability to place the swap partition on the fastest part of the disk (pi and RPM vs linear velocity and all that).

It certainly was, and he sure does.
My (admittedly fairly limited) real-world tests don't show any performance penalty for swap files though, at least not on an ext4 formatted SSD. Swap files have been a thing for many years, so I'd expect most of the bees are ironed out by now.

TBF, BTRFS is a COW filesystem. Swap files on COW filesystems are always going to need explicit support from the FS, and are always going to be a hack.
If running BTRFS (or ZFS), I'd go with a swap partition any day. Ideally more than one and on different devices so they can stripe.

As I said, the packages from tdrnetworks need a higher priority. The whole point of that repo is providing php-fpm & co without systemd deps.

~$ apt-cache policy php7.4-fpm
php7.4-fpm:
  Installed: 7.4.22-1+devuan3~1
  Candidate: 7.4.22-1+devuan3~1
  Version table:
     7.4.23-1+0~20210826.50+debian10~1.gbpb41c6a 200
        200 https://packages.sury.org/php buster/main amd64 Packages
 *** 7.4.22-1+devuan3~1 500
        500 https://pkgs.tdrnetworks.com/apt/devuan beowulf/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

I tried it for a while, when I was looking for a systemd-free distro for my desktop and Devuan was still woefully behind even Debian stable WRT package versions.
It was nice in it's default setup, but anything beyond that ran afoul of the Artix repos being slim pickings, and compatibility (read sync) with the upstream Arch repos, even for init-unrelated things, being a constant source of pain.

The library version incompatibility problems actually reminded me of early-days (2006-2008) Arch itself... And the reasons I stopped using it.

If you do try it, I'd be interested to hear how (and if) it's matured. I might give it a spin again one day.

Right, now we're backing away from "You're mentally sick" with an apology?
Frankly, I expect you've thoroughly burned your bridges here already. You started this. You started swearing and rubbishing the Devuan devs while people were trying to help you. You then resorted to personal attacks.

Others might be more inclined to forgive this little tantrum, but I'm certainly not going to bother talking to you any more. I'm sure as hell not going to engage in the little game of semantic trolling you seem to be trying to start with your last wall of text.

As a wise man once said, plonk.

No, it's not. forums.debian.net is logically abbreviated to FDN, always has been, always will be.

And you're obnoxious.

A) No, you weren't.
B) If you want respect, earn it. Like everyone else does.

LOL was in use on BBS systems in the late '80s. You're clearly too young to remember.

Speaking only for myself of course, I've given up on FDN. The sheer scale of the help vampire infestation is depressing.
With the place so full of people who both expect some kind of special treatment (i.e. didn't read the "no warranty" clause in the installer and expect the equivalent of paid support for free), and can't be bothered with even elementary netiquette (e.g. not posting huge images of text), I'm surprised any help goes on there at all.

What makes you think Devuan wants respect from the likes of you anyhow?

Devuan ships a well-tested default desktop configuration with sane choices specifically for people who don't know what they're doing (or what they want).
If you deviate from that, you're expected to pay attention to what software you install. This is neither new, nor unusual.

And again with this "your respect" thing... As if that's something to be desired. You clearly expect people to respect your opinions and time, yet you give nothing back.
How about "respect" for the unpaid volunteers who made Devuan a thing to begin with, huh? Where's your contribution that  entitles you to be so critical?

Just to screw with self-important tools like yourself, obviously.

Your poor choices and lack of prior research cost you time and data. Devuan is free.

I looked the other way when you made similar accusations and generally acted like a spoilt brat over on FDN. I'll not do so again.
Nobody here owes you anything. The Devuan developers don't owe you anything either.
The door is right over there, if you don't like this distro then I suggest you use it.

You have the right to do whatever you like... But kindly do your trolling somewhere far away from here.

As for your initial problem, it takes all of a few seconds to install rfkill from the installation media. That's why it's on the  installation media.
Shock and horror, some people installing Devuan aren't intending to use it on a laptop, or as a desktop. They don't need rfkill or any other wireless networking bloat, so installing it by default when the desktop task isn't selected would be counterproductive.

On the whole, if you're more interested in obnoxious ranting than in solving your own problems, I suggest you go back to one of the "easy-mode" desktop-oriented distros, like Ubuntu.

You've already shown that you can't handle IRC, have problems with people expressing real feelings, and consider such banal things as edit history "harassment". Has it occurred to you that it may be your attitude which is the problem, rather than pretty much the entire FOSS community (which got along fine without you the last ~25 years)?

I was actually going to say "Welcome to Devuan" when I saw you over here... That is until I read your latest asinine ranting.
I'll not make that mistake again. If you want to behave like a child, do it elsewhere.

PSA @ everyone else: This user has a history of kicking up a fuss over nothing, policing other people's language and attitude while acting like a spoilt brat and slinging personal insults themself, and borderline trolling WRT systemd over on FDN.
I honestly suggest the best course is to simply ignore them from here on in, or at least until the entitled attitude improves.

You did notice the [razz] on the end of my post, right? Here, I'll do it again for good measure

Then again, I'm not really sure why one would want to run ASCII with a bunch of backports now that Beowulf is stable... Does TDE not build on Beowulf or something?

As much as I loved KDE3 back in the day, the setup in those screenshots is way, way to busy and far too... Lime for my taste.
No offence, that's just me, I kinda have a thing about 900 icons all over the place when there's a perfectly good application menu to be had.
Each to their own I guess.

On a semi-related note, I just recently installed KDE1.1 on one of my retro-boxen.
IMO the default setup there needs a bunch of redundant icons removed from the panels to not be a visually-overwhelming mess as well... Just like I remember doing in 1999.
I even got a pre-insanity GNOME up and running, a fully configurable and completely nautilus-free experience if you will. It's kinda nice too.

...And if you must give untrusted users a shell, at least put sane limits on the system resources they can consume. There aren't many legitimate reasons an untrusted user process needs 5GB of RAM and a million inodes.

Funny you should mention that, as there's an example of the inevitable consequences of running such a large codebase as PID1 linked in that same Reg article.

Remember how us old-school *nix nerds said PID1 should be as simple as possible, since a crash there will bring the whole system down?

In some 20+ years I have never seen nor heard tell of an unprivileged process crashing sysv init, yet here we are again with systemd.
This one was at least patched quickly, but the core design fault isn't going away - on the contrary, systemd is getting fatter with every release and the potential attack surface just keeps on growing.

...And so is the former. Using a mouse in BIOS setup is a nightmare, and the very first thing I look for is an "advanced" or "classic" mode that is navigable with the keyboard.

Don't forget auto-reinstalling the horrific ad-filled motherboard manufacturers shovelware. ASUS "Armoury Crate" springs to mind there, that thing is pretty much the modern take on a boot-sector virus.

Of course it is. Just follow the money-trail, and you'll find the usual suspects with the usual motivations.
As for the FSF, it's kind of outside their mandate... And personally I don't think they have the balls for it.
Maybe we'll see a bigger, meaner brother to the anti-tivoization clause in the GPL one day, but I suspect such would be too much of a threat-to-revenue (again, the usual suspects are funding many projects) for anyone to actually use it. Even Linus rejected GPL3 over that one.

Ahh, so somebody else sees this for what it is. Woot.
Here I was thinking I was the only one with a feeling of creeping dread over the whole "Micro$oft/Google/Oracle etc. etc. loves Linux" thing... It smelled oh-so-fishy from day one, and IME leopards don't often change their spots so radically, least of all when there's fresh meat to be had.

Microsoft is Microsoft, and they're still in it for the money, nothing else. If making the last wild GNU bend over and get their kernel image signed waters the money-tree, that's what they'll do. Who's gonna stop them?

What irks me most is the number of people I know (some of them skilled and well-paid devs) who think WSL and all it's accompanying "embrace" bollocks is pure awesome sauce.
So many people drinking the convenience koolaid, and nobody asks why it's there in the first place. Dude, it's bait

Yeah, that and 99% of the worlds other problems too.

I'm not anti-capitalist mind, but this has gone far too far for far too long, and the rot is deep. Personally I expect it'd take an apocalypse-level event (or that mass-uprising that'll never happen because everyone is so damn apathetic) to change it, at least in the "developed" world.
Hey, who knows, maybe this apocalypse-level anthropomorphic climate change thing we seem so hell bent on courting will do the trick?

I'm kinda blowing some of the dust off my old-tech low-level x86 foo at the moment, maybe It'll even come to hacking my BIOS and burning 'proms again to get around secure broken boot. That'd be proper full-circle that would.