maybe the wording of "workflows" is worse than "pico-distributions" and the term chomwitt was searching for is "flavours" a-la ubuntu or "respins" a la manjaro.

to give an example some such respin could be an openbox + thunar + tint2 + jgmenu to provide an alternative to the xfce, gnome and kde desktops, call the metapackage something like "bunsen desktop" as those 4 component are what bunsenlabs linux builds their desktop with, another metapackage could be an equivalent of the "ubuntu studio", something like a "devuan studio" package that pulls other 4 metapackages for "audio" "graphics" "photography" and "video"

to such an assortment of metapackages we could then come and define multiple community maintained metapackages to provide various desktop experiences and workflows.

tho there would require some standarization to have all this metapackages depend on standar xdg-destktop features so that there won't be a package that "implodes and doesn't work" unless someone goes out of the way to do something super custom, at which point installing these "workflows" and "pico-distro" metapackages would be counterproductive.

you are on a forum for a niche linux distro, why niche? 'cuz a lotta users don't care what happens in between the press of the power button and the login screen showing up on their display.

as for the users on the forum my bet is a good lot of us are on the "20 to 30 and has never had an actual date" demographic.

you could give this thing i made a shot, it was originally made with the x11 achitecture in mind but it is written in pure posix shell and should be flexible enough to work with wayland, tho i still got to add some more stuff to differentiate the managed daemons in groups other than the current session service group

https://github.com/eylles/shed

yeh i've been having problems with blueman on excalibur for a while so i've been doing everything through the bluetoothctl cli

you can get mirror urls from https://www.devuan.org/get-devuan

if you don't feel like editing apt sources manually you can use https://github.com/eylles/devuan-script … mirrors.sh which is not really automatic but it allows you to simply put the bare urls inside a config file and let the script do the rest.

well, terrible idea but if you are a vim/nvim user there's always vimwiki.

but if you want something more stand alone there's joplin https://joplinapp.org/

for editing config files there are also ways that don't involve running a text editor as root, but running it as a normal user and then using tee with sudo and an askpass program to create an authentication prompt so that the current buffer of the text editor (for example vim) is sent to tee and then tee which has root priviledges just writes the text onto the file.

other option is to make use of sudoedit

oh man i know that, got a couple rolls of sheet metal, some 1/8th spools of wire, some lenghts of industrial 4 conductor wire i gotta turn to extension cords one day and a good hold of pvc pipe that i keep telling myself i'll turn into a phone holder for an old tripod and the rest into a recurve bow... and that is just the stuff i've more or less thought about what to do with, then i got a good chunk of half written software i gotta sit down and polish

fun i just so happen to have some useful pieces of code on other scripts in https://github.com/eylles/devuan-scripts/ (check every single one, take every piece of code ya want, it is licensed apache2)

in short is to decide if using sudo, sudo with askpass or pkexec:

  has_tty=""
  if tty | grep -qF -e "dev/tty" -e "dev/pts"; then
    has_tty=1
  fi
  if [ -n "$has_tty" ]; then
    sudo command
  else
    if [ -n "$SUDO_ASKPASS" ]; then
      sudo -A command
    else
      pkexec command
    fi
  fi

the content of $SUDO_ASKPASS is usually some program to read a password from the user, some use dmenu or rofi but both programs advice not to use them for password prompts... on my system i set SUDO_ASKPASS to /usr/bin/ssh-askpass which is provided by the ssh-askpass-gnome package, tho i also got a polkit authentication agent for programs like gparted and the like, on my case i run /usr/lib/policykit-1-gnome/polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1 as a daemon inside my user session the program is provided by the policykit-1-gnome package.

what services are we speaking of tho? services that are ran as root or their own user, ie the ones in /etc/init.d OR services to run as part of the user session?

if it is the first then it is okay to use update-rc.d for sysvinit, tho for other inits such as runit or open rc it would just be a question of detecting which init system is being used and instead of using update-rc.d use a different command, the machinery inside the wrapper will remain the same just changing update-rc.d for the corresponding command to the init system.

and speaking of, i jumped the gun and cobbled a script that for the time being i'm calling initctl that wraps update-rc.d and service at https://github.com/eylles/devuan-script … er/initctl

for the second case it i already got a solution of sorts that i've been working on for a while now, it still is alpha software, it works but i still have to implement some more features like separating the main session processes (window manager, status bar, etc) from the more secondary processes (compositor, clipboard manager, network applet, blueman, etc...) and adding singleshot type processes as right now it assumes everything is a daemon of sorts, it is implementen in pure posix shell https://github.com/eylles/shed

update-rc.d is a perl script, you can always set up a wrapper around it, my suggestion for a graphical wrapper is to do it in 2 parts, one part a pure shell script that does the job of taking an action (enable disable) and multiple inputs to distribute them to update-rc.d, so that you can do:
wrapper disable cups bluetooth cups-registryd and then inside the script do something like this:

args=""
# while the number of arguments is greater than 0
while [ "$#" -gt 0 ]; do
    case "$1" in
        enable|disable|defaults|remove|defaults-disable)
            action="$1"
            ;;
        *) args="$args $1"
            ;;
    esac
    shift
done

for service in $args; do
    update-rc.d "$service" "$action"
done

then on your GUI frontend with either yad zenity or the program to display menus and create GUIs of your choice you can take multiple inputs from the user and send them with either sudo -A (ensure a SUDO_ASKPASS program is set, i use ssh-askpass-gnome which is linked on /usr/bin/ssh-askpas) or pkexec run the wrapper script, this ensure that you are protecting the enabling|disabling|removal requiring sudo authentication and that you are authenticating only once for a call to the wrapper so that all the services get the action applied to them instead of having to require an authentication per service to be enabled|disbaled.

i've looked some times at the power profiles daemon, if you think it will do the job you want just feed the systemd unit to https://github.com/RosstheRoss/sysd2v and it will output an init-d-script style initscript, you can read more about that framework with man 5 init-d-script

speaking of the power profiles daemon you do have to "manually" change which power profile you want to use, i personally much prefer something more automatic  since i do not like to be thinking about what "profile" i want as i usually want my laptop to respond to
A) power source state, ie: is it running on battery or the AC adapter is connected.
B) the load on the system, the more cpu demanding some task is the higher performance options i want.

for that matter i considered rolling an initscript to use https://github.com/AdnanHodzic/auto-cpufreq but after reading the code it does additional stuff that i don't need and is running on a python interpreter which is not lightweight to say... so i ended up rolling out my own solution which is a very lightweight shellscript that only makes use of very few utilities not to mention can react to the usage of the gamemoderun tool which i use for prioritizing games over other processes when gaming, finally my solution does set some of kernel tunables wihch auto-cpufreq doesn't even touch (tho TLP does set some from what i've seen).
you can grab the latest release tarball from the releases section https://github.com/eylles/afreq.sh and install with a simple sudo make install install-sysv , the daemon is highly configurable tho i have not made a manpage yet, neither does it support pstates for intel or amd tho it is on my list to implement support for those.