I'm a sucker for games. It's the one realm where I tolerate proprietary software.

A handful of Steam games (mostly from Paradox Interactive), EVE Online under Wine now and then, and some SNES and GBA games using emulators.

And Wesnoth. Wesnoth is pretty much the *only* Free Software game that manages to hold my attention. I hope that changes in the near future.

I agree with many of the points raised here, and am especially happy to see Eric take interest in Devuan.

One of the biggest drawbacks of Debian, in my opinion, is the obtuse documentation and the stubborn insistance on *building* "unofficial" installers but never mentioning them in the documentation.

LiveCDs containing various desktop environments, bootable from USB, and containing non-free firmware are *extremely* useful for new and veteran users alike. They're especially useful for troubleshooting, system recovery, and the inclusion of the debian-installer as a secondary GRUB boot option allows for extremely customized installs without sacrificing any of the power available to Debian's rather good installer.

In case anybody's not familiar with the images I'm referring to, they can be found here.

I *sincerely* hope that Devuan's current lack of those is an issue of manpower and not willingness. In an ideal future, those images would be auto-built and published, with a simple web-based way to find them that's prominently featured in the download section. We could debate about the best way to present that info, but taking an interested user from "Downloads" to the right image file is really a matter of three questions: Desktop or Server? Rolling or stable? What's your preferred desktop environment?

Debian's release model, and by extension, Devuan's, supports every one of those use cases without infrastructure changes or patches to the debian-installer. It's simply a matter of presenting that information to users logically - after the images are built, of course. Excepting the "manpower and willingness" part, that's fairly trivial; most of the differences are available via d-i preseeding and are already supported by taskselect.

I haven't yet looked into the Devuan SDK to see if there's a more appropriate method via "The Devuan Way", but it's something I'm very interested in. I'd be happy to put energy or resources into seeing this happen.

The persistence that esr mentions is going to be harder. I don't think d-i handles that at all, but if that's a use case others find value in, I'm sure there are tools from other distros that can meet the need.

Simple productivity workstation.

Devuan Ceres running Cinnamon desktop with 8 virtual desktops, each named and assigned a specific purpose. Browser, Communication, Work, Downloads, Finances, Music, Terminals, and Scratch.

Next to the desktop thumbnails is a workspace selector by name. I rarely use it, but it's handy when I'm holding a cup of tea or coffee and don't want to use keyboard shortcuts.

In the middle of the screen, commonly used storage locations, my application menu, hardware controls, and a system tray. To the far right, user settings, system settings, and calendar. I rarely use the user or system settings, but the calendar is handy.

Heavily keyboard centric, with heavy use of quadrant snapping for window management. Quadrant snapping + tabs works better for me than tiling window managers, personally.

I've used this setup for years, and it's really well suited to my workflow. I'm getting a little sick of the theme though, it could use some more polish. Now that I've made the move over from Debian and am refactoring my system setup scripts, I'll probably take the time to setup a proper rice using some of the minimal base16 palettes that grab my attention so often on /r/unixporn.

Also pictured, neofetch's inability to detect Devuan Ceres properly.