running daedalus+kde and pstree shows the very first process created by init is ModemManager.
my devuan machine will never need the services of ModemManager and i would like to disable it.

ModemManager is not a 'service' , is not an XDG 'autostart', is not a KDE 'autostart'. it seems to
be baked-in. on my kubuntu box systemd has ModemManager 'masked' so that it never starts.

in devuan how do you stop/disable ModemManager?

i would like to use schedutil cpu frequency governor for my computer
but cannot. there must be something i am missing, but i do not know
what.

computer has ryzen 5700g and the 6.5 kernel from daedalus-backports
so that amd-pstate-epp driver is being used.

checking the kernel config, i see SCHEDUTIL is built-in:

> grep CPU_FREQ /boot/config-$(uname -r)   
   ...
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_DEFAULT_GOV_SCHEDUTIL=y
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_GOV_PERFORMANCE=y
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_GOV_POWERSAVE=m
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_GOV_USERSPACE=m
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_GOV_ONDEMAND=m
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_GOV_CONSERVATIVE=m
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_GOV_SCHEDUTIL=y

list of loadable kernel modules checks out:

> ls -l /lib/modules/6.5.0-0.deb12.4-amd64/kernel/drivers/cpufreq   
   ...
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 22899 Nov 23 15:05 cpufreq_conservative.ko
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 33531 Nov 23 15:05 cpufreq_ondemand.ko
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  9539 Nov 23 15:05 cpufreq_powersave.ko
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 18123 Nov 23 15:05 cpufreq_userspace.ko

list of available drivers is not what i expected:

> cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_governors
performance powersave

cpupower also not what i expected:

> cpupower frequency-info
analyzing CPU 11:
  driver: amd-pstate-epp
  CPUs which run at the same hardware frequency: 11
  CPUs which need to have their frequency coordinated by software: 11
  maximum transition latency:  Cannot determine or is not supported.
  hardware limits: 400 MHz - 4.67 GHz
  available cpufreq governors: performance powersave
  current policy: frequency should be within 400 MHz and 4.67 GHz.
                  The governor "powersave" may decide which speed to use
                  within this range.
  current CPU frequency: Unable to call hardware
  current CPU frequency: 400 MHz (asserted by call to kernel)
  boost state support:
    Supported: yes
    Active: no

what needs to be done to switch to schedutil ?

i want to share my recent experience installing devuan+KDE onto a small
form factor computer. this setup has a ryzen 5700G and an MSI B550 ITX
motherboard with a 1TB Samsung 970 PRO with an EFI partition. so, nothing
fancy and no GPU as the 5700G has built-in graphics.

this installation did not go well.

i tried to use the netinstall iso so that i could minimize the number
of packages to remove post-install. but i was unable to get netinstall
to work, it either failed to install or left an incomplete install.

the first netinstall errors i was able to get around. this mobo has
builtin wifi and bluetooth. the BIOS defaults to leaving them enabled.
netinstall would fail to install when wifi was enabled with a odd
message about /target, which i gather had something to do with
missing wifi firmware, although this bit was not mentioned. so, when
using netinstall you MUST disable wifi in BIOS or it will fail.

the BIOS also enables, by default, secure boot. in this BIOS the secure
boot setting is under 'windows setup', so it took me a while to find it.
with secure boot enabled, netinstall fails with an error message about
'shim-boot' or something. did not write this down. after disabling
secure boot in BIOS netinstall was able to install a base system, no
DE was installed.

whew!

but i want KDE for my DE, so after login, i installed the minimal KDE
package via: apt install kde-plasma-desktop.

all packages were installed, no errors were produced. but, after
reboot, i could not login. the sddm greeter would not accept my password.
the greeter screen looks _nothing_ like i see in the two devuan VM's
i have. the greeter screen is all white with a small 'password' box,
so sddm has been incompletely installed or mis-configured. i could
not figure out what the problem was.

as an experiment, i installed the xfce desktop via netinstall and
everything worked as expected. so then i installed KDE and selected
slim as the greeter instead of sddm. this change allowed me to login
but the screen was locked to 1024x768 and xrandr refused to run.
as i use a 4K monitor (old man, bad eyes) this result was no good.

at this point i gave up on netinstall. too many problems and i did
not want to spend any more time chasing them down.

so i went with 'live' iso install. this went smoothly, although it
loads up on packages that i do not want. after login i installed
KDE, selected sddm as greeter, and rebooted. this time i was able
to get my password recognized, the 4K monitor was recognized and
i was able to remove xfce, emacs and libreoffice. btw, was not
expecting emacs! the only problem is the sddm greeter screen is
all white with a tiny password box, not the usual stuff that appears,
so something is still misconfigured but i have no idea what.

i will say that installing devuan+KDE into a QEMU VM is a helluva
smoother process than bare-metal install.