Well, since I proposed looking into it, I decided it wouldn't hurt to see if I could get it to work on Excalibur.
I set up a virtual machine, got the latest netinstall rc1 image, installed the system with the default XFCE desktop environment and got to tinkering with it.
First I ran apt install shepherd which pulled a few dependencies with it too. Then, I installed the shepherd-debian 1.5-2 amd64.deb package from the link I provided.
This includes a bunch of scripts to get many services and daemons running so you have a working OS, as well as a configuration file called /etc/shepherd.scm
In the config file I changed udevd to point from /lib/systemd/systemd-udevd to /sbin/udevd
Then, under root, I did:

nano /etc/default/grub

And there I modified the following:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="init=/usr/bin/shepherd"

And then did sudo update-grub
Unfortunately, the system did not boot and gave an error saying:
shepherd: error: "/etc/shepherd.scm": exception thrown while loading configuration file
When adding shepherd.debug into the grub config I got this output:

shepherd[1]: while loading configuration file '/etc/shepherd.scm' "no code for module (system ffi-help-rt)

Apparently, the shepherd packaged in Debian/Devuan is not a dynamic executable and it doesn't include extensions like the Guile FFI which allow it to make system calls for functions like mount, umount, stat, and kill, as well as handle errors and signals.

Later I found out the Debian/Devuan shepherd package also included its own two example configs in usr/share/doc/shepherd/examples/.
At this point, I thought awesomeadam.scm was the most promising way to get a working system and I decided to try to adapt it for Devuan.
Here are the changes I've done:
1) Update all /usr/local/etc/init.d/ paths to point to /etc/init.d/
2) Removed the systemd- prefix for the udev services.
3) Changed the path from /lib/systemd/systemd-udevd to /sbin/udevd
4) Changed the line from #:start (make-forkexec-constructor '("/lib/apparmor/apparmor.systemd" "reload")) to #:start (make-forkexec-constructor '("/etc/init.d/apparmor" "start"))
5) Changed from lightdm:

(define lightdm
  (service '(lightdm display-manager)
	   #:requirement '(dbus)
	   #:documentation "The lightdm service provides the Light Display Manager."
	   #:start (make-forkexec-constructor '("/usr/local/etc/init.d/lightdm"))
	   #:stop (make-kill-destructor)
	   #:respawn? #t))

to slim:

(define slim
  (service '(slim display-manager)
	   #:requirement '(dbus)
	   #:documentation "The slim service provides the Simple Login Manager."
	   #:start (make-forkexec-constructor '("/etc/init.d/slim"))
	   #:stop (make-kill-destructor)
 	   #:respawn? #t))

And updated the register-services and start-service lists to use slim instead of lightdm.
Then, I renamed the file to shepherd.scm and put it into /etc

At this point, I updated GRUB to boot with shepherd again and got vmgwfx errors saying my configuration was likely broken and my hypervisor was unsupported and I didn't get to the slim login screen.
At this point, without any clear information on what was going on, I got stuck.
Well, at least it understands what to do when you press Ctrl+Alt+Del and now I know the scripts turned out to be useless.

Thank you for trying to help but I have an Intel device. That said, I might try to set up ALSA on it again once Excalibur is out. I've been getting more into making music again lately and I notice that having direct access to the audio hardware tends to sharply reduce the latency and produce less cracking and farting sounds out of the DAWs which is good because my hardware is pretty underpowered by modern standards.

I agree here completely and I tend to prefer software that solves one problem well and doesn't come with a plethora of features I don't need.
Sometimes though, it's hard to find good alternatives and I think the situation will inevitably get even worse in time.

I think the first sign that Excalibur is close would be when beta.devuan.org is updated.
That said, I'd rather they don't rush things. Who knows how much more garbage has been added to Trixie?
Apparently, in Trixie, apt won't let you remove systemd during installation unless you tell it to --allow-remove-essential so I guess it's a step backwards towards their "Systemd but we support exploring alternatives" vote in 2019.

Hi greenjeans, this is in no way meant to question you or anything. I'm simply curious because I always thought the idea behind Debian and, by extension, Devuan, was to build the new version for 2 years, release it as stable and then most packages wouldn't even be updated unless a security issue is found within them so it just seemed a bit odd to port xlibre to a stable system that should still run fine with X11. And I doubt that within 3 months xlibre has had any serious changes happen to make it stand out compared to what we already have now. That said, I haven't really dug that deep into it to see how far in development it's been. Obviously for Forky or other future versions of Debian the situation would be different should Debian decide to drop Xorg support altogether.

I understand, I'm not a developer, so my first instinct is to read the description and see if something is useful to me or not and how to install it.
By the way, kudos on making a GUI tool for ALSA.
I'm personally using Pipewire. I tried switching from pulse to ALSA a few times in the past but I couldn't get my laptop mic working on ALSA so I had to go back to pulse. It's still possible that someday I'll join your little club when I end up building my next PC and switch to external mics and it's good if there will be more options than using the command line to set things up.

Hi fsmithred, thank you very much for replying to my message!
Yes, I understand that now the package is included in Devuan as well, but, in my understanding, Shepherd is not a drop-in replacement init system like SysVinit is to systemd, it requires more work to get daemons and services running.
I tried to find more information about this and in my search I stumbled upon this post for Bookworm that talks about how to get Shepherd running.
I wonder if this user's scripts can be used to implement official out of the box Shepherd support for Excalibur?
https://www.opopop.net/Debian_Bookworm_ … it_system/