No 386 unfortunately, the oldest operational machine I have is an IBM PC 330 100-DX4 (AKA 6571-W5L).
Intel 486 DX4-100, 256k L2 (WT), 48MB 70ns FPM RAM, CL-GD5430 video (via VLB-PCI bridge).
I have a DX2-66 CPU I could drop in it for some extra slowness, and I could probably try underclocking it, if the IBM CrippleBIOS(TM) will let me of course.

It's running the latest FreeDOS, which I'm not overly keen to uproot, and the drive is a) FAT32 formatted, and b) a complete bastard to get at, so if you want such a data point you'll have to point me at a source for this QBasic whatsit. I was a Pascal nerd back when, so I never had need or desire to go near it.

Well, you do you and all that. I'll take sneedacity seriously when the volume of functional, constructive commits exceeds that of asinine juvenile memeing, "easter eggs", and changing the names of anything and everything to be as offensive as possible.
That kind of behaviour might fly on the 'chans, but it's a lousy way to run a software project.

...which is, unsurprisingly, full of the same.

Tenacity does indeed look more like a software project and less like a frat-party, but then activity on any of the forks is still largely just buggering about with documentation and naming.
Dealing with the trademark issues is a necessary evil, but it gives few real clues as to the committent, ability, or intent of the contributors. Any fool can shove a bunch of docs through sed.

Frankly I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop, ya' know, the one that contains some technical merit. The politics and bickering is just a sideshow.
Right now what we have is several largely-unaltered copies of the original codebase, with varying levels of "hey look, I changed one line in README.md" contribution.

I'm sure one or other of the squabbling tribes will pull together (or even in vaguely the same direction) sooner or later, but as it stands the difference between sneedacity/tenacity/audacium/etc. etc. and me just pulling the audacity gpl code and patching out the the corporate insanity myself is effectively nil.

Personally I suggest waiting until the 4chan-powered clown-car pulls all the way out of the station before labelling anything "official".
While I do find both the name and the ongoing flamewar(s) somewhat amusing, right now picking out the competent developers from the trolls and small children is an exercise in futility. Time alone will tell which fork is in it for the long-game.

Arguing over a name is indeed funny, the doxxing and real-world harassment it lead to is not.

LOL, sure it is...

It also takes an age to load, even with javascript. I recommend you learn how to write HTML, you'll get better results.

In other news, please go away, and please desist from spamming this board with things nobody here is remotely interested in.

If at some point you decide to put some useful content on that website vapid blog, as opposed to the current religious claptrap, baseless accusations ("the LinuC website was attacked by Devuan hackers!", ROFL), and general paranoid rambling, I might have a look... But at this point it appears to contain nothing but drivel, vaporware, and a few links to distrowatch.

The door is just over there, and if this is all you have to share I suggest you use it post-haste.

I came to much the same conclusion, and I run Gentoo on my desktop.
There's effort, and then there's effort. Dealing with one packaging system at a time is enough for me.

On key combos, it might also be worth enabling magic sysrq (IIRC it's restricted by default), if all else fails that usually gets you a console (or at least a memory dump) so you can see what's going on.

But yeah, I'm with HoaS, I recon it's probably a video driver problem.

I don't think anyone can force them per-se, at least not yet. What will likely happen is that as more and more upstream projects are subsumed into systemd, the burden of maintaining them or writing alternatives will become a major problem.

That's one of the reasons I plug Gentoo pretty hard, they (by which I mean "we", it's still "we" with Gentoo) are actively forking, fixing, and maintaining upstream stuff to keep it working. Eudev and elogind are the most obvious examples, but Gentoo also led the charge with untangling gnome from systemd, among other things, and continues to do so.

As far as Devuan goes, I do love apt and the (old) Debian attitude, but I wonder how long we can keep things working without support from mainstream Debian. The team is small (and seems pretty remote TBH), and there's rather a lot that's going to need forking...

Debian fell a long time ago, they've ceased to be a democracy (or a meritocracy), stopped listening to the users, and I expect the divide between "user" and "developer" is too wide now for that to change.

I've been in and out of the Debian community for several years, and the change there is pretty stark. Gone are most of the really knowledgable sysadmin types, and the "make linux popular"/"everything work OOTB"/"I just wanna click on stuff", CLI-phobic zoom-installing, "halp everything is borken" (AKA gnome didn't start), unwilling to learn help-vampires are proliferating like crazy.
The "You're crazy if you don't want systemd, systemd is the future" inquisition is out in full-force as well.
Admittedly systemd-free distros do tend to attract the odd conspiracy theory whackjob... but then what community doesn't have it's share of nutters... And as the man said, just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

The "resist shiny new shit, don't fix it if it isn't broken" attitude and no non-free stuff by default policy were two major reasons I started running Debian to begin with (that and automation for headless machines). Then somebody fixed something that wasn't broken, split the community and the devs down the middle, and it all went to hell.
Now that Debian is squarely on the slippery slope, I expect we'll be seeing proprietary blob installation and snaps as an option in the installer soon as well.

Again, I'll plug Gentoo here - it's a magical land-of-olde where you can still openly argue with the developers on the forum (they are active on the forum) without fear of locks or bans, and becoming one of those developers yourself is just a matter of proving that you have the chops and the motivation.
I rejoined that community after over a decade away (pretty much when Debian fell), and it was delightful. All the same people doing the same stuff they were doing in 2003.
No "One-Linux" garbage, no arguments over how easy the installer isn't or how the CLI is obsolete, and no being dismissed as a nutter for trying to do something outside "the way". Real bright people with real advice that isn't the "just go with the flow, it's easier" attitude you seem to get everywhere else these days.
RTFM is still alive and well (and TFM is very good), as is "help me to help you". The facebook-generation help-vampires are non-existent, and the signal-to-noise ratio is still satisfyingly high.

Want to run without systemd? Ask a Gentoo user.
Don't like pulseaudio? Ask a Gentoo user.
Want to keep your split /usr setup? Hit up the Gentoo forum, we're arguing about it right now.
Pining for a static /dev like the old days? Hey, you can do that on Gentoo as well.
No crapkit, no whatever-d? No problem (and probably no DE, but that's a preference). Just compile the system without it.

I first read it long ago, when this "One-Linux" shitstorm was just getting started. I thought it was perhaps a little overexcited at the time (after all, surely intelligent people will see this for what it is and reject it), but looking back from ~6 years later all the predictions were spot on.

What we're dealing with now isn't some conspiracy theory or the ramblings of a revolutionary, it's reality. A reality where, in most large GNU/Linux distributions, "GNU" is being systematically replaced and the many small independent projects that used to make up the OS are being pushed to the curbside in favour of a few large all-consuming projects all developed by the same special few and funded by the same corporations.
A reality where devs are mythical, unapproachable beings who know what you want before you want it, and Linux is a "product" with an "image" and a social-media presence.

Systemd as init I could live with. Systemd as an optional init I would be happy with. Systemd the OS is another kettle of fish altogether.

It doesn't help one bit that those who are driving this are mostly holier-than-thou assholes either TBH, especially Lennart. You only have to read a few of his comments regarding Gentoo and Devuan to get the picture - we're all luddites and peasants, and the future is his way or the highway... But now I'm ranting, so I'll stop there.

Bedrock is kinda cool, but I'm far too attached to the old-school distro concept to pay too much attention to it... yet. Right now it's still a bit of an experiment IMO.

Perhaps. Personally I suspect that the "future of linux" (at least as far as the big players go) is that systemd + containers + snap/flatpack/appimage/whatever-silly-packaging-system-is-easy-for-proprietary-devs is going to take over. That's what corporate interests are pushing for, and many "open source" orgs are already thoroughly compromised.

Once this happens, a "distro" will just be cosmetic configuration on top of systemd + gnome. Big-tech will have successfully eliminated the independent maintainer, replaced all the critical GPL system infrastructure with LGPL systemd, and undermined Free Software to the point that the remaining old-school hackers will have to return to whatever holdout distros remain - which probably means Slackware, Gentoo, and maybe Devuan*... Or move to BSD.

Yes, it's a pessimistic prediction, and I do hope I'm wrong. It sure looks like "embrace, extend, extinguish" is in full swing though, and right now I'd say we're well into step 2. Even Microsoft has realised that they can't fight FLOSS directly, and they've been buying out projects and developers all over the place. Soon most of the important components of GNU/Linux will be open-source community efforts in name alone. It's not a bazaar any more if all the stalls are franchisees.

*Devuan is great and all, but we're still heavily dependent on upstream Debian... These days I don't trust the Debian devs to resist the smell of money any more than Redhat.

Or, someone should think before copy-pasting commands from a forum.

Bloat!

$ cal
     March 2021     
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
    1  2  3  4  5  6
 7  8  9 10 11 12 13
14 15 16 17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30 31

See, I can play this silly game too

No worries, and no apology needed. This was more a "(loudly) bring it to somebody's attention that this stuff is slipping through again" than a "how do I fix it". Fixing it is easy, it's the "making sure 'debian' doesn't keep slipping into our default configs and breaking things" bit that I'm after.

Yeah, I'll get to that just as soon as I get around to figuring out how to report bugs... Round tuits are in short supply right now.

How many headless boxes do you administer? If you don't like needing to ssh into each one to apply updates, and want your machines to keep themselves up to date, mail you with results and schedule their own reboots for when there are no users logged in, unattended-upgrades is for you.

It's been in main at least as far back as etch, so it's not exactly exotic and I'm fairly confident I'm not the only one using it.

It sheds light on the grub menu problem, but this being a new (post point-release) install it already has that fix.

PRETTY_NAME="Devuan GNU/Linux 3 (beowulf)"
NAME="Devuan GNU/Linux"
VERSION_ID="3"
VERSION="3 (beowulf)"
VERSION_CODENAME=beowulf
ID=devuan
ID_LIKE=debian
HOME_URL="https://www.devuan.org/"
SUPPORT_URL="https://devuan.org/os/community"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.devuan.org/"

This is another problem of the same class all right though, i.e. rolling debian packages into the repos without checking them for debianisms.