Sure, I'll get right on that. As soon as somebody starts paying me to man the helpdesk.

In case you have somehow missed the memo, nobody here is obliged to be nice to you, answer your posts exactly the way you like, or try to help you at all for that matter.
Devuan is not obliged to provide you with anything either, let alone pander to your pedantic expectations, and the included software comes with no warranty of any kind. If you don't like it the way it is, either do something constructive about it or don't use it.

Throwing a tantrum over such trivial matters as covered in this thread is entirely on you. If you're going to behave that way, then I expect this community is better of without you anyway.

Sheesh, the entitlement of some people. All over an "alarming" lack of gnome-user-manager preinstalled FFS.

So long, and thanks for being todays entertainment.

Noxious attitude aside, surely I'm not the only one who finds amusement in this prima-donna wailing, gnashing of teeth, and claims of "existential issues" over a minor discrepancy in the installer and some random GNOME management tool not being installed by default. 
Especially when none of this is really a problem if one were to, shock and horror, just use the CLI tools.

The only way to find out if you will like dwm is to try dwm... With an open mind and a willingness to fiddle with it a bit.

I don't have a beowulf install to play with right now... But lynis appears to have very few dependencies, so it should be amenable to a simple local backport. That's far less likely to make a mess than trying to install the chimarea binary package anyway.

The real question is why... Is there actually some change that you need, or is it just "newer must be better"?

OTOH, you could just dist-upgrade to stable. You're going to sooner or later, and this might be a suitable excuse to get on with it.

To be fair, MS swiped most of their core GUI designs from Apple and Xerox to begin with.

I have no problem with copying UI designs, so long as they're good UI designs. Changing just to keep up with the latest cosmetic trend, or worse still just to be different... Yeah, that doesn't improve anything.

Egads, what's with all the fuss over this trivia? User management is an infrequent administrative task, just use the CLI.

TBH I don't get why one would want capitalisation in a username anyway, all it achieves is making it more difficult to type and easier to confuse... Which is probably why, since the early days of *NIX, 99% of usernames have been lower-case and nobody really cared.
If you want to add your real name with correct capitalisation and whatnot, there are dedicated fields in the user record for that stuff.

Indeed.

It's also obnoxious and irrelvevant to the topic at hand, of course.

A well-meaning dude walks into a bar free-software community to share his contribution...
Cue a bunch of meatheads dogpiling and turning the thread into a political flamewar, just because he happens to live in a country whose current politics they disagree with.

Politics be damned, some days i'm ashamed to be a member of this species.

To pick on just one sliver of the considerable nonsense in here: Why on earth would you want to disable filesystem checks?
They do nothing to general system responsiveness and we haven't had actual boot-time forced fscks for anything but "oh-shit-your-fs-is-fscked" scenarios since journalling became a thing... somewhere around 2001.
Fsck is fine, leave the poor thing alone.
So is cron for that matter. Cron is nice, and cron is useful. Cron uses about 2MB of memory, and unless you have something really dumb in your crontabs it won't do anything at all to performance.

Color me not at all surprised. Almost anything is faster than the default XFCE desktop. KDE 3.x was awesome of course... but It's also pretty ancient now.
If you want to see a responsive DE though, what you really want is KDE 1.1. That's what my Pentium MMX machine runs, and it runs it swimmingly.

General performance tips: Avoid DEs. Avoid GTK3. If anyone or anything mentions GNOME or GTK4, panic.
Also 99% of things written in python/pygtk seem small on-disk, but run like a gut-shot pig compared to their C/C++ counterparts. It's a trap.

Pro-level performance on almost anything: Don't install a GUI at all. If you really must fondle a rodent, use a standalone window manager.

FWIW, I played a round of the "got a cheap decade-old laptop" game recently, and ya know what? A fully-functional (though akonadi-free) plasma install uses 200-300MB less memory than the refracta XFCE setup, and is noticeably more responsive. Got more knobs and shiny bits too.

I really have no idea why XFCE is Devuan's default desktop TBH, if I had to guess "gnome without systemd is too hard, so this is as close as we can get" is the best i have.
It sure ain't because it's fast.

RIP XFCE, the mouse got fat... Ate too many gnome libraries most likely.

Trivia: You used to get a whole GUI OS (including a web browser) in less bytes than most "modern" distros kernel + modules.
You also used to be able to fit a functional GNU/Linux system on a single 1.44MB floppy disk.

Wirth's law is all too real.

Actually it's... Freedom. Choice is just a side-effect of the "freedom to modify" bit.

Choice is, on the other hand, the reason I moved away from Debian, and the reason I'm steadily moving away from binary distros in general. Primarily, that's the choice to not install 500lbs of crap I don't want or use.

For example: Want to install ffmpeg just for CLI transcoding? Too bad, guess you'll need a bunch of X libraries, GLX stuff, fonts you'll never use, and vulkan headers (FFS) as well... Because Debian / Devuan compiles against every possible thing, and seems to be more and more aimed at desktop deployments by the day.
For another, have a look at the unholy mess in /etc on a "modern" binary distro, and ask yourself: How much of this do I use, and how much do I even know what it's for?

Frankly I find this all extremely annoying, and If I have to recompile a bunch of stuff just to get a simple, understandable OS without a heap of redundant kitchen-sink functionality and 50 abstraction layers for everything, I might as well just build the whole system from source to begin with.

Anyway, this is horribly off-topic. Maybe if the OP replies someday...

Wow, this is turning into an ordeal. Really not sure why, it should be as simple as:

apt install linux-headers-amd64 zfs-modules zfsutils

All three are metapackages, and should select linux-headers-{version}-{arch}, zfs-dkms, and zfsutils-linux respectively... Or at least they do on my minimal chimera install, with both recommends and suggests disabled.

Add

apt install zfs-zed

if you want event monitoring (you do),

apt install zfs-auto-snapshot

if you want automatic snapshotting from cron, and

apt install zfs-initramfs

if you want to be able to do root-on-zfs.

Aside, you might also prefer the 2.1.5 packages from chimera-backports, there have been some improvements...

Otherwise, yeah, full output needed to see why the zfs and spl modules are not being installed.

FWIW, I did have a bit of fun getting my filesystems mounted at boot after a beowulf -> chimaera upgrade, it would appear the init scripts for 2.0.3 and 2.1.5 are both kinda broken (WRT LSB depends and ordering), this commit puts things back how (IMO) they should be.

On that note... Any particular reason we're moving to that (unmentionable, IME) thing instead of using the venerable debian-installer? I mean, we kinda have a serviceable wheel already, no?

Fringe browser labels Devuan a fringe OS...

Pot, meet kettle

If the site in question isn't running some pile of "browser check" javascript trash, you can probably cheat by just changing your user-agent...
Then again Palemoon is kinda garbage anyway, as is the general attitude of the developers.

And unavailable early in the boot process, the initrd, or by default on many minimal installs.
Shift+pgup is both ingrained muscle-memory and a lot less annoying (IMO) than the likes of vi-style keybinds, and screen is gratuitous bloat when all you want is a fully functional VT.

Console scrollback has been around forever, and it's one of the very first things that made me go "wow, this is way better" when transitioning from DOS.
Frankly this "everyone just uses the GUI (or laptop/phablet/whatever trendy disposable junk is FotM) these days" rubbish is getting extremely annoying. I for one use real VTs on a real PC every day, and have since the late '90s.

Now I' guess I'm just waiting for GNU/Linux to remove VTs altogether, make touchscreens mandatory, and replace all kernel output with inane spinning widgets and emojis.
I'm sure all the windows refugees will just love it, since there'd be no need to learn to read and no keyboard to clean the drool out of.

Well that was quick.

We have a weiner, and really, I should have seen it coming...
Via auditd (yeah, it's better than fnotifystat):

proctitle=/usr/bin/python3 /usr/bin/systemctl list-units --full --all 
type=PATH msg=audit(11/06/22 05:16:39.046:1736) : item=1 name=/var/run/samba/nmbd.pid inode=41571 dev=00:15 mode=file,644 ouid=root ogid=root rdev=00:00 nametype=NORMAL cap_fp=none cap_fi=none cap_fe=0 cap_fver=0 
type=PATH msg=audit(11/06/22 05:16:39.046:1736) : item=0 name=/var/run/samba/ inode=16650 dev=00:15 mode=dir,755 ouid=root ogid=root rdev=00:00 nametype=PARENT cap_fp=none cap_fi=none cap_fe=0 cap_fver=0 
type=CWD msg=audit(11/06/22 05:16:39.046:1736) : cwd=/root 
type=SYSCALL msg=audit(11/06/22 05:16:39.046:1736) : arch=x86_64 syscall=openat success=yes exit=3 a0=0xffffff9c a1=0x7f257ac19050 a2=O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC|O_CLOEXEC a3=0x1b6 items=2 ppid=16701 pid=16702 auid=steve uid=root gid=root euid=root suid=root fsuid=root egid=root sgid=root fsgid=root tty=pts2 ses=16 comm=systemctl exe=/usr/bin/python3.7 subj==unconfined key=rundir

Sure enough:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jun 11 05:16 /var/run/samba/nmbd.pid

And it's not even some dodgy crap I backported myself this time:

Package systemctl:                              
i   1.4.4147-1~bpo10+1                                             oldstable-backports                         200

This particular footgun was installed to satisfy some crappy postinst stuff in the packages from zmrepo (which actually works fine without systemd but was clearly packaged by a muppet).
I thought it would be relatively safe in that context as all the postinst does is a 'systemctl status zoneminder' and nothing else should use it (this is Devuan after all, and we don't use systemd, right? RIGHT?)... But if it's on the system it looks like it gets called by a bunch of other things too - in this case, somewhere downstream of a 'service apache2 reload'.
Said zmrepo package was only installed because there's nothing for beowulf... Which is odd and kinda annoying, as there is a backport for ascii.

Anyone care to speculate why a command that is supposed to simply list units is stomping all over everything? Or why there is a loaded footgun in the devuan repos without a depends !sysvinit safety catch?

Conclusions:
1) That standalone systemctl package is an extremely nasty trap. I don't know why it's nuking my pidfiles and I don't really speak python, but I might have a look later. For now it goes in the naughty corner where it belongs.
2) Installing zoneminder on this box was probably a bad idea to begin with. It's nominally a mailserver (with roundcube webmail via apache), but it had disk space to burn, a webserver already installed, and it was convenient at the time. 'twas intended to be a temporary solution, but you know how that usually goes.