Well folks, first 15 days with Devuan Excalibur. I'm a long time KDE user, since Mandrake 6 (first version to be distributed on newsstand magazines in Brazil) then all the way till Mandriva death and then Kubuntu. I don't intend to make comparisons, but some points are worth to mention. I use a T430 Thinkpad as a daily driver dual boot with W10, so no new hardware here. I started with Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial and went all the way till 25.10. I don't like a lot of things of Ubuntu, and the way they impose things has annoyed me a lot through the years. UPstart, MIR, Wayland, Unit, PPA, SNAP and more recently Rust. As things are becoming more bad and biased each year, I had to give an enough is enough. A couple of months ago Lunduke made some videos of Distros and Devuan and OpenMandriva were exactly what I was looking for. I was very tempted to go back to Mandriva, but Mandriva gave me a sort of trauma with small RPM community distros. I had a hard time trying to move to Mageia back then in a previous notebook which came with Mandriva from factory. One thing that I started to look at from that moment was a company-backed distro. So, I decided to migrated to Ubuntu, one thing I had to admit, the dependencies and installation hell almost were gone after that. That was before GPT and DNF, and 99% of internet help was:"sudo apt something", so I got used to the rhythm.

My /home partition is separated, and it was just format everything else. Devuan installation didn't work wirelessly on first trial. I had to download the drivers on a separate pen drive and load them (iwlwifi). Gpt helped (and is helping) a lot with everything, It said is a known Debian issue ( as some others later), But I managed to install fine with KDE (no other DE at that moment). I had my previous list of installed software and I went through it, installing everything which was not installed before. No biiiig issue. Discover app isn't working fine by itself, I have to add flatplak to make it install things, but at the end it worked. The sound is not working directy. Gpt a workaround to pipewire which I run as a script after login. I'll open a bug report for that. As KDE discover and some other issues like kscreen locking GUI were happening, I decided to open a Bug request to KDE, just to find out they close it next day. I'm supposed to have the latest KDE to report a bug, which is 6.5, and Trixie/Excalibur came with it. 6.3. They said they “move fast” but c'mom that's ridiculous. I have just installed a brand-new system. As KDE is also scheduling a Wayland only in a near future(2027?), I think about start to get used to other DE, so I installed cinnamon, didn't like too much, and then went to XFCE4. So I thought about switching XFCE/KDE from time to time. I also installed XLibre, and I'm running KDE/XFCE with it. No problems with it yet. Please keep supporting these guys. I thought it would be easy, but it's not working as expected, when I switch from DEs, Brave looses it sessions authorizations. So I had to keep logging to Google, X and everything again. Gpt helped to find that XFCE uses gnome Keyring opposed to KDE that uses Kwallet. Tried to make XFCE use KWallet but without success. Tried to make KDE use gnome keyring without success. Still working on those. Very time-consuming, so I'm going whenever I can. Proton VPN extension was also an issue. Didn't work. GPT culprit MESA, suggest force downgrade, I did, broke KDE, installed again. Proton VPN was still not running, and I gave up and installed another VPN extension. I also use a software called Jjazzlab for music backing track, which is having issues, it uses FluidSynth midi, that is not working as expected, I'm still checking on that.

GPT many times gave me systemd related tips (systemctl , journalctl, updatedb…) and I have to keep remembering it, I'm using Devuan. No systemd! So it changes the output. Not 100% trustable. I notice the system start / shutdown is a bit faster, but sometimes the "this is a know bug from Debian" annoys me somehow. As I said before I have some disagreements with what Ubuntu is doing, and I don't know if just a perception but seems that a lot of things got more tied to systemd; and it's like this is the only way of doing things, and people just follows. Ubuntu has the merit to put their system running fine, "round", as we say here. I really didn't have too much trouble with LTS systems. But it's a lock-in, as years pass by, this lock-in goes more deep, and it's like some developers are opting to embrace because "it's the way things are". I know I'll get to a point where I'll be comfort with Devuan and the way things work here. But I wasn't expecting to have such work, maybe a brand-new release, maybe it's just an adaptation, but I feel like, you know, what the hell is happening with these Linux companies? It’s all for power and money? Where are we heading to ?  Thanks and sorry for the long text.