Why not just answer my question? What is the position on politics here?

Because I see one type of politics being posted freely, but no pushback from the other side... which makes me nervous, because I am on that other side, to be perfectly honest.

I don't like places where one type of political viewpoint is tolerated as being just "whimsical" and common sense, whereas other types of opinion are treated as being "political" and (usually, I find) used to push those people out. Subtly or not so subtly.

I would love to contribute, but I have my plate full at the moment with various things that drain my energy. I'm not by any stretch a "new generation", lol, I'm mid-50s now and feeling it every day. Been trying to develop a website for the last 23 years, with some success and many failures, both personal and financial. At this point I'm deep in debt and making one last push to try and get my codebase into shape for growing the business into something that can be more self sustaining, or even great (I have ambitions to take on the likes of Facebook, Twitter, even Google, in places where it hurts). The problem is my website is completely supported by voluntary donations, and I am not a good salesman or pitchman for fundraising drives. Hence the debt. Taking care of 10+ neighborhood stray cats who drain both my time and my wallet, only adds to the stress levels. All of which is by way of explaining why, while I would certainly love to contribute, I am fighting to keep my head above water myself at the moment. Once I have built myself a boat to climb into and dry off, then I might have some spare resources to help Devuan. Sorry for the long explanation, just didn't want you to thing I'm blowing it off. I really would like to help, I'm just honestly stretched to the limit at the moment, in many different respects.

One of the things that really depresses me about humanity is our propensity to want to control others. I always wondered how Linux was allowed to survive, why the big players didn't move to either squelch it or else control it and make it theirs. I guess systemd is the answer, by the looks of it. Very sad, everything good becomes corrupted eventually, seems to just be how we work.

How long before they work out ways to exclude Devuan from being able to decouple systemd? I'm sure it's in the works.

This is all interesting, thanks. Keep it coming!

For my part, I developed web applications on Windows (mostly C++) during the 90s, starting in 1995. I went off on my own around 1999 and started looking around for a platform I could use to start my own web business. Microsoft and even Netscape (they were still doing their server at that point) seemed too expensive, and all the commercial database solutions likewise. Eventually I settled on a completely Open Source software stack, including Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl. For Linux, I went with Red Hat because it was very available off-the-shelf in the stores (I lived in NYC back then). I also consulted on Wall Street and was able to introduce some of the people I worked with to Linux, due to the easy availability of the retail version of Red Hat, and the ability to upgrade if/when they decided to put something into production, to the Enterprise version.

I went off Red Hat when they decided to discontinue the retail version of their software and instead split into just Fedora and Enterprise. I may be a little fuzzy at this point (it's been over 20 years now) but my recollection is that while previously there was a seamless upgrade path from their retail, off-the-shelf Red Hat, now there was no longer such a seamless path from Fedora to Enterprise, and I don't think Fedora had the same kind of support options that the old Red Hat had. They told us that Fedora was the cheapie version for "the community" (i.e. the unwashed masses who never buy support), there was either that or Enterprise, nothing in between. So I could no longer take a cheap (but supported) version of retail Red Hat Linux in to my Wall St buddies and show it to them and tell them that yes, they could buy support (important to those guys) and then have an easy path to an Enterprise version.

It seemed to me that Red Hat was fobbing off the "free" community with Fedora, and I felt kind of betrayed by the whole experience. I went off Red Hat and never looked at it again, because it was apparent to me back then that they were mainly focused on the money... but even then, they were being really stupid about it. I was working with some major Wall St players at the time (Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs) and it would have been great to introduce them to Linux in a way that gave them a cheap introduction, they could walk down to J&R Music World and buy a $40 package and play with it, and if they liked it, upgrade in place to the Enterprise. I was there at the front lines, in a position to get Linux into these major companies at that early point in time, when everything was frothy and there was opportunity everywhere. And, as I saw it, Red Hat just screwed the pooch. I was the guy who could have gotten Linux into those companies, the easy way, with upgrade paths to Enterprise, and they dropped the ball big time.

Anyway, after that I went to Slackware for a while, before settling on Debian, which I've used up until now. I stayed with Stretch as long as I could, because after that systemd was (as I understood it) even more embedded into everything, which made me uncomfortable just on principle. I worked with Microsoft products through the 90s, and I remember vividly how they worked to "embrace, extend, extinguish". At Banker's Trust I went to presentations from Microsoft and Netscape while the browser wars were still raging. I remember being so angry at Microsoft's behavior. Netscape had a good product and were trying to sell it, and Microsoft simply put them out of business by bundling a free browser with their OS. Not only that, but it was a shitty browser (IE6, groan) and then they also tried to "own" the Web by making everything on their desktop a "link" or whatever. And they added more and more layers of crap in their APIs and also extended the Web standards with their own proprietary extensions. It was horrible.

As such, if Red Hat is trying to make Linux into their own private impenetrable black box, like the Windows registry, then f*ck everything about that. One of the big reasons I liked Linux initially was its accessibility and transparency, and the fact that most everything was a file, and you could just go edit text files, and it was all these separate scripts and programs that did their one thing. You could pipe between programs and see the logs and plug and play, it was like walking out into the sunshine after the crap I had endured with Microsoft.

Old joke: How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: None - they just declare darkness the new standard.

I just wonder, though, HOW this all was allowed to happen by the community. Like, the process. Who decides what happens in "Linux", as a whole? I'm not familiar with that political scene, I know Linus is the guy who guides the kernel development, but who decided that Linux would have systemd, like, everywhere? Why did all distros feel like they had to have it? How did it "take over" the way it did. It feels like some kind of coup, but I'm sure there are community processes that are supposed to stop this kind of thing, surely? Or is it all so disorganized that it was just ripe for the plucking? The first company that came along (Red Hat?) with the money to pour into funding development, they got de facto control? Was it Gnome, I read that systemd was first in the sound drivers, or coming out of that, and then it was more tightly integrated into Gnome, and all the distros want to include Gnome, so that's how it spread? Is it a case of "get it into this one part of the system, then if other distros want to have the "current latest and greatest" sound drivers, then they have to drag in systemd too"? So the foot is in the door, but then how did it take over... everything? It's a very interesting question for me, the minutiae of how that happened exactly. I'm sure there should be lessons in there, which we should probably try and learn from.

Wow, this seems like a very active community, which is encouraging. Thanks for the tips and images, which I have downloaded and will try out as soon as I can on my site. I'll post a link when I have it up, and again my apologies for being slow here. I'm still getting to grips with all the changes in the new system on my dev workstation (not just Devuan related, but also the jump from Debian Stretch -> current stable - a lot of things have changed or behave differently, so I need to do a lot of testing before doing the production server). I honestly wasn't expecting this kind of quick response, so thanks again - bodes well for this being a solid choice for my distro going forward. :-)

Hey, that's very neat, thanks! It works.

If any creative types out there want to have a go, please post a link. Devuan can use all the exposure it can get, so having a ready-made, slick/professional-looking "powered by" logo that you can put on your website can only help to spread awareness.

SUCCESS! I tried again using Expert installation option, and sure enough this time it prompted me for nonfree packages. I don't think it did that during the regular install. So I selected that, but then when I booted into the new system, it still came up with the horrible low resolution. I did notice something go by at the start of the boot messages, something that might have been related to Radeon, but it was gone too fast. The first thing I tried was to install firmware-amd-graphics, and then reboot, and voila - now it works with the monitor's native resolution. All good!

Thanks again for the help, it feels good running a system without systemd. I know that might be irrational, I don't know, but it just didn't sit right with me. The added hassle of things like systemctl and binary logs etc were all part of it, but just in general it felt like there was something alien living in my computer which I didn't ask for and didn't want. I hope Devuan can keep this little rebellion going down the line, because I for one don't want to drink that Kool-Aid.

Ok, so... now to start rebuilding from scratch, yet again... but this is par for the course, in my experience every new install requires several iterations, it just seems to be the karmic fee for doing this stuff. At least I can do it with a smile on my face knowing that systemd no longer has a stranglehold on my system processes. :-)

I use onboard graphics, plain vanilla. Install was netinstall from usb stick, copied the .iso to the /dev/sdx as per instructions. I think I used the standard install, not expert, though tbh I'm not sure. I believe it was standard, because that's what I would have tried by default (just to see if it would work) and I don't recall any issues with the whole installation process. That went very smoothly. So probably standard install. I don't know what the sources.list looked like at this point, since I have since reinstalled Bookworm and that's what's up right now.

Sorry for the back and forth, I know it must be something stupid and simple. Maybe I should have done Expert install, perhaps that's the magic ingredient I was missing.

One other thought - I read somewhere that Bookworm is the "easiest" Debian to install yet, as it automatically includes nonfree packages and drivers at install time. So it automatically finds proprietary wireless drivers that previously you would have to hunt around for manually (e.g. I was unable to install Debian Bullseye on a recent laptop, due to it not detecting the wifi card, but Bookworm sailed through flawlessly). I don't know if that's an accurate memory, but could that be accounting for the difference I'm seeing between Bookworm and Devuan? Does Devuan have access to all the same nonfree drivers etc that Bookworm has? If not by default, is there any way to enable that during install? Just curious, this feels like a simple case of "driver not found" but it all works fine with Bookworm, so not sure if video drivers and monitor stuff is tied tightly to systemd (and thus maybe not there yet for Devuan). Why isn't there any graphical install in Devuan, for example? The lack of graphical install would seem to point to there being SOME difference when it comes to graphics. Sorry, just pondering out loud here.