I went ahead and installed Daedalus on an old laptop, and I've discovered a few interesting things.

First off, I removed pulseaudio with the following:

apt purge pulseaudio
apt --purge autoremove

Firefox works just fine with pure alsa, no apulse required. If anyone is having issues with firefox and alsa, make sure you purge pulseaudio. I assume if you only remove, rather than purge, then some configuration files get left behind that mess with firefox.

Second, I encountered the issue in this thread:
https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=6243
For now booting into 6.1.0-10 is working just fine. I have no idea how to configure Grub to boot a different kernel by default. Lilo was so much simpler... I suppose I could remove 6.1.0-15 and block it from installing.

Third, the lock screen behaves very strangely when I close the lid. The previous contents of the screen are visible, but I cannot interact with them. If I enter my password the screen unlocks successfully. It does this with both the default configuration, and when I alter /usr/bin/xflock4 to use slimlock instead of xscreensaver. Selecting Lock Screen from the menu behaves as expected.

Disabling xscreensaver entirely seems to occasionally leave the system in an unrecoverable state, where I just have a blank screen, and am unable to switch to a TTY. I haven't figured out which conditions produce this result yet. I intend to put void back on this laptop, so I'm not going to bother to fix it.

This. Setting alsa settings through ~/.asoundrc is better than messing with modprobe if you aren't using pulseaudio. To summarize the archwiki,

Run aplay -l

aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: Device0ID [Device 0 Name], device 0: Multichannel [Multichannel]
  Subdevices: 0/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: Device1ID [Device 1 Name], device 0: Multichannel [Multichannel]
  Subdevices: 0/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

Find your desired device, we will pick Device 0
Create ~/.asoundrc with the contents

pcm.!default {
    type hw
    card Device0ID
}

ctl.!default {
    type hw
    card Device0ID
}

I can put together a more advanced guide if you want to set different input and output devices.

Regarding firefox not recognizing .asoundrc, I cannot reproduce the issue, but my .asoundrc is closer to

pcm.!default {
    type plug
    slave {
        pcm "hw.Device0ID"
    }
}

ctl.!default {
    type hw
    card Device0ID
}

Edit: I actually do remember firefox causing me trouble now that I think about it. Here's a previous post I made. It seems like firefox expects a plug device as default. http://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?pid=16014#p16014

Removing pulseaudio should be as simple as

apt-get purge pulseaudio

Note that if you remove pulseaudio you MUST purge it. Otherwise configuration files are left behind that break alsa.

Pulseaudios default settings are fine for most users. I honestly wouldn't worry about it unless it gives you problems.

With my desktop hardware, a 44.1 khz sampling rate gives me noise issues. All my audio needs to be re-sampled to 48 khz. With pulseaudio the latency is too high, and the re-sample quality could be better. When I tried bringing down the latency and increasing the re-sample quality the resource usage increased significantly. Alsa doesn't give me those issues, and I find the configuration files significantly easier to understand and modify.

My ancient laptop also performs better without pulseaudio, and I suspect others with older devices would benefit from a pure alsa setup as well.

The Brave website states it is fully open source.

Brave really feels like it's trying to be the "Privacy Web Browser" for those who don't really know what that means, with a thick layer of gimmicks on top. The whole thing comes off almost as exploitative.

I've not tried Ungoogled Chromium yet, but I do use Iridium https://iridiumbrowser.de/. Unfortunately, Iridium seems to be dead. The last release was in July, and the last github commit was on November 7. Ungoogled Chromium seems like a solid replacement.

Excellent, that answered my question perfectly. Thanks.

I'm curious. Did you have to manually enable DRM content, or does Void build Firefox/Chromium with that enabled by default?

If it's enabled by default, this means that your browser automatically downloaded and installed the closed source, proprietary Widevine DRM plugin onto your PC without asking.

The less likely scenario is that Netflix switched to an open source format for streaming.

Virtualbox was removed from Debian Buster in April
https://tracker.debian.org/news/1038163 … m-testing/
virtualbox: might not be suitable for stable releases due to lack of cooperation from upstream on security support for older releases

I've been using Pale Moon for a couple months now, both in Devuan and Windows (gasp).

The Windows version gave me too many problems. Websites were broken that weren't on the linux version. I don't know if this was user error, or if there was a problem with the build, but it was easier to just move back to Firefox.

The linux version has been usable, but I still had a couple problems.
While watching full screen video, the browser failed to prevent my screen from going idle. I remember having this problem with Firefox 52 as well.
The "Don't load tabs until selected" option doesn't seem to do anything. New tabs always autoload.
Youtube loads an older version of the site, which I actually prefer. Simpler to use, less resource usage, and looks nicer.

I've encountered one addon that I can't seem to get working. I downloaded Redirector from the Classic Add-ons Archive, and it just gives me an error "Redirector does not work in Private Mode", even when I'm just using a regular window. This could be because it's built for Firefox and is running in Firefox compatibility mode.

Dire Straits - Sultans Of Swing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fAQhSRLQnM

And a short one
Black Sabbath - Orchid
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cc-6pAkC2T4

Edit: My apologies, after reviewing the supported devices list, you were correct in looking at wl
https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/use … ed_devices

I'll leave the original post up in case it helps someone else.

You shouldn't need the wl package. To get my b43 device working, I installed

b43-fwcutter
firmware-b43-installer
firmware-b43legacy-installer

You should only need one of the firmware packages. I just installed both because I didn't know which one was correct, and I didn't want to take the time to find out.

I'm not a lawyer, so take this with the appropriate amount of salt.

libdvdcss2 is opensource GPL software designed to bypass the encryption on DVDs.

The reason why it can't be included by default in Debian/Devuan is because of US copyright law. As I understand, it is illegal in the US to distribute software designed to bypass copyright protection. VLC can produce and distribute libdvdcss2 because they are based in France, where copyright law is less restrictive. Notice how the package downloads the source code from VLCs servers and builds it locally.

This has nothing to do with "beta quality software" or "the Linux community". Windows, and other proprietary operating systems, can play DVDs out of the box because they are able and willing to pay licensing fees for proprietary codecs. They don't need to jump through hoops to enable users to view content they legally purchased. If anything, the problem is with DVDs themselves.

If you want a Linux Distribution that can include codecs, try Linux Mint. It's based in Ireland, which also has less restrictive copyright law. Mint is also more likely to "just work" without putting in the effort, which seems to be what you're looking for. Just be prepared to get frustrated when it becomes a massive pain to do any significant customization, and expect systemd to give you grief.