For what it's worth. (Sorry.)

I don't think so. Nothing wrong with GNOME. We don't all use stone age machines and it's nice to have a polished, professional desktop in which there is actually a design principle.

FWIW I run it on a 12 year old ThinkPad X201 and it's fine, not slow at all. I have tamed it somewhat by masking half a million services but that's a systemd feature so I won't share it here.

Google created it because of the legal requirements imposed by Europe's GDPR legislation. It only affects the Analytics engine itself but that's all most sites use these days.

I know it works because when it's installed I stop seeing ads about stuff I've been talking about in the front room and instead start seeing ads about women's underwear. Result!

To stop Google's Analytics tracking you across the web simply install the official GA opt-out add-on for your browser:

https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout?hl=en

Snap!

The package originates with Debian so a fix will be dependent on them. The only caveat is that Debian policy allows the maintainer to ignore non-systemd support requests. Hopefully they will want to fix it for all init systems. Updating the bug report with the working version of the patch would probably help.

Sorry OP, that was my fault, I should have been more clear in respect of the dpkg-reconfigure command.

Anyway, I'm glad you got things fixed.

Just leave it then. It doesn't make any real difference anyway.

I can't post there any more. Those forums are no longer cool enough for me.

Remove that added line from ~/.bashrc

Looks like your locales are messed up so try

# apt reinstall locales

Then edit /etc/locale.gen to un-comment de_DE.UTF-8 & en_US.UTF-8, save the file and run

# locale-gen

Does dpkg-reconfigure work after that?

I very much doubt a change in PID1 would be noticeable.

I prefer openrc-init & runit-init as PID1 over systemd or sysvinit but only because of their small code base compared to the alternatives (especially systemd). My Alpine system performs identically with either busybox or openrc-init as PID1, the only difference I can detect are in the boot messages.

So can we see the full output of

# apt update
# apt policy base-files

Thanks!

EDIT: 12.3 is the latest version so try

# apt install -t unstable base-files

Post any errors in full if it doesn't work.

EDIT: s/ceres/unstable/

I think you need to explain exactly what you want to do here.

In respect of this:

#!/bin/sh
while : FLAG=0; do
touch=$(date +%N)
    starfish -d 60 -o ~/Wallpaper/$(date +%N)
sleep 60000
done

Why FLAG=0? I think chris2be8 was using that to create an infinite loop but my while : bit does that already.

Why have you set the touch variable and then not used it?

Why are you using the -d flag for starfish? I think that controls the delay between switching wallpapers when it's run in daemon mode. It's not needed at all if you just want to create a bunch of wallpaper image files.

If you just want a random wallpaper switcher then run starfish as a daemon, then you won't have to save any image files at all because they will be generated on demand. I think this is the intended mode of operation anyway.

Debian sid certainly freezes. There may be a few package updates but not many. At least in my recent experience.

EDIT: to change from sysvinit to openrc use

# apt install openrc

But that will still use sysvinit as PID1. To use openrc-init as PID1 see https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=2788.