Is that netbook one of this very new designs? Then it is possible that its an uefi only bios, no more CSM mode. I own such a laptop manufactured Dec 2020, an Acer Aspire 5.

The installation media has to be booted either in legacy mode or uefi mode, one medium for both installation methods. This mode determines the grub installation method.
One way to do that could be the boot override option. On my X570 boards this is the F8 key, on my laptop F12. I see there a USB stick twice. As example one entry "Toshiba 8G", a second time the same stick as "UEFI Toshiba 8G". Guess what that means.

Another more easy way could be the use of Ventoj. That tells you if its booted in legacy or in (u)efi mode.

To make sure you have booted the stick in efi mode fsmithred's hint can be used for a crosscheck.

What you call SoftwareMGR is no Cinnamon package. Can't find a trace in Synaptic. You need to dig the WWW yourself for its origin and the boundary conditions it requires to work.

My advise: use Synaptic, that works on every of the large DEs.

No. daedalus main is present in line #1 and line #9 (counting every single line including the ones without contents). The order of the first 3 and last 3 lines is slightly different, but since parts of the info is present twice you get the warning.

I would recommend to add "contrib non-free non-free-firmware" to the first 3 lines for the full daedalus repos, and to delete all the rest from line 5 to the end. One empty line is required on the end of the file. I am running my PCs this way.

deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-updates main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-security main contrib non-free non-free-firmware 

Some reading about the sources.list: https://www.devuan.org/os/packages

Which DE do you use? Is that KDE? Or something else?

Well, I am used to only use the console for updating my Devuan systems. I have a root terminal configured, and I am just entering:

# apt update
# apt full-upgrade 
# apt update 

Only once in a while I am using Synaptic as a graphics tool to search for packages. Works perfectly.

Maybe you started off from Daedalus since neither Excalibur no ceres have any installation media. And when that entry isn't updated .... In any case the sources.list tells the truth.

Well, you laptop isn't brand new, so Daedalus should work fine. On the other hand a clean testing = Excalibur also might have some charms to you. But both will require a clean install, you won't be able to easily clean up the mixture you got.

You should be able to configure the network manager to find wired and wireless connections.

Would agree. I had the consolekit in the way on an older upgrade once, replaced by the elogind packages.

Show us a

# apt list libpolkit-backend-consolekit-1-0 

BTW: have you executed a

# apt full-upgrade 

?

To add my finding about the usrmerge package on my Daedalus installation which was installed more than one year ago from a preview when Daedalus still was Testing, where I answered the question during installation with yes:

# apt list usrmerge
Auflistung… Fertig
usrmerge/stable,stable 35 all 

This package obviously is not installed? What does this tell me? I am confused. According to a German web page I should see links from /bin, the /lib and /libxx folders and /sbin to the respective folders in /usr. I don't see any links.

I think the critical point is an upgrade of a non-merged system to a Devuan release which supports usr-merge. As far as I understand the upgrade process you end up with a non-merged Devuan. If you then apply the usr-merge package, you end up with programs in the wrong spot.

I did not mind the usr-merge like many of the participants in this discussion do, I accepted it as a ToDo for the future. I did my latest installations answering the usr-merge-question during the install from the first appearance onward with yes and had no issues with the operation of the systems nor the few release upgrades I did so far.

And from Debian 12 Bookworm onward usr-merge is mandatory and they have started to move packages. This then naturally applies for Debian 13 Trixie as well as for Devuan Daedalus and Excalibur. Have fun ...

You could but that would generate all locales on your PC which I guess you will not want. Just select the one(s) that are relevant for you. en_GB.utf8 or en_US.utf8? Or both?

Try a

 dpkg-reconfigure locales 

as root.