What a way to kick off the new year. Yes, amazing news. Yes, it's time to retire 32-bit systems. Yes, everyone should be using the latest Intel and AMD products by now, especially with AI "features".

It is so truly revolutionary on Debian's part to push further towards being a rolling release distro. All they wanted was to make it easier to communicate with your multiple processes, they said. Oh, and then when that wasn't enough, they also wanted to make it more user-friendly to start your system and easily manage your services. Even after all of that, they still wanted to use memory-safe programming languages to make it easier to code your software, and now they want to make your graphical session more secure and modern.

Hooray for progress! Linux (without the GNU, because we shouldn't scare away newbies) is finally letting go of stability and embracing on-demand updates!

The great thing about Qt5 is that you can set an environmental variable to make your programs use GTK2, thus an easier time matching your preferred theme. That also includes VLC.

Simply install the package qt5-gtk2-platformtheme (add qt5ct and qt5-style-plugins if you want to tinker further). After that, open up your ~/.profile file and add export QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=gtk2 to it. Save it, log out, and log back in. Pretty much any Qt5 program will look and feel more like GTK2. For example, if you used the GTK3 version of Transmission, the Qt5 version will match your GTK2 themes and icons! It's basically a lifehack to always prefer Qt5 versions over GTK3 versions whenever possible.

Firefox and its forks (e.g. LibreWolf) also allow you to change its default GTK3 filepicker to the Qt5 filepicker. Just install xdg-desktop-portal-kde, which should start automatically. Go to about:config, search for widget.use-xdg-desktop-portal.file-picker, and change 2 to 1. Try to open or save then. Pale Moon is the only "modern" GTK2 Web browser still being maintained.

CSD is an abomination. Thankfully, some GTK3 programs are merciful enough to let us disable them either through setting GTK_CSD=0 or in their options (wow, we have a choice). I know Celluloid lets you do that.

So, what do you guys propose we do? Take up on maintaining LXDE (GTK2) and add the better features from Xfce? Or do we fork Xfce 4.12 (last GTK2 release), remove all the Wayland and GTK3 dependencies, and cherry pick the features and bug fixes from upstream? Also, SpaceFM supported up to four panels, but it's been abandoned, yet it's the ONLY file manager that lets you customize everything under the sun. It is a lot of work, and many of us don't have coding experience. In which case, i3 is all we'll have to settle for in the not-so-distant future.

Assume all Intel CPUs since the end of the Core2 Duo/Quad era to be backdoored. AMD CPUs started doing something very similar just a handful of years later, but it's a different term -- and yes, it affects the popular Ryzen lines.

In terms of a "secure" OS, there isn't one. Not by default, at least. On the other hand, my understanding is that the less lines of redundant code, the less likely there will be tampering. It's a good idea to phase out the Linux kernel and embrace OpenBSD. If you can't do that, then Alpine Linux might be a good carryover for now. Note that these might not be as fast or as responsive as Devuan, but they are tailored to the paranoid among us.

For a good list on the pros and cons of each e-mail provider, Dig Deeper laid it out on this article. It's definitely a good idea to not put all your eggs in one basket, so use a mixture of different providers for different use cases. Better yet, self-host your own e-mail accounts if you have an unmanaged hosting service. Always assume that someday, an attacker might read all of your e-mails (in which case, start encrypting your messages).

Similarly, Dig Deeper also posted his article on which Web browsers to use. Just as I mentioned back there with using multiple e-mail providers, the same would be recommended for the browsers (especially since not all Web sites will work correctly on a lighter browser such as Pale Moon or SeaMonkey, but Ungoogled Chromium or LibreWolf could be a good middle ground between privacy and "convenience"). Might not even be a good idea to rely on Tor Browser anymore.

Also, have a look at Spyware Watchdog for some spyware mitigation tutorials. The Web site also talks about non-browser software spyware risks.

It's highly recommended to use a stable VPN that has been routinely audited. Mullvad for paid and Riseup VPN for free (they are GPL-compliant) services. NordVPN is alright, but like I said, never put all your eggs in one basket.

Get your own router (don't use your ISP's), install OpenBSD on it, tinker with it, and keep as many connections strictly wired. Only exception would be if you are on the move with a laptop, but anything that sits on your desk is much more worth it to have Ethernet extension cords all over your walls hooked up to them. Encrypt and store away all sensitive data.

There are more tips, but I think these should cover the base of things. Just use common sense whenever applicable (hint: always). The parasites that shall not be named are working diligently to brush this information off, giving the masses the illusion that they have no freedom to begin with. I'd rather have enemies for sticking to my guns than to have "friends" for going with what the mainstream narrative tells us to believe.

If you don't like a distro, just don't use it. Find the one that works best for your use cases, but don't distrohop. Devuan itself is just a tool for those who want Systemd removed from an Aptitude-based distro, and it does a good job at making all the services compatible with traditional inits. Everything else falls on the user to customize it the way that they like it.

In my case, I always base my installs on Refracta, which is a well-done Devuan respin by the same guy you're butthurt over. No one distro out of the box is for everyone. That's just the reality of FLOSS. You are more than welcome to stick to Debian or another distro... In fact, you could go above and beyond by doing us all a favor: go back to Windows 10/11/whatever and stay there. Their support team at least will get a paycheck for babysitting you.

You can also edit your repositories via Synaptic Package Manager (sudo apt install synaptic) by going to Settings, and then Repositories. The rest of it is pretty straight-forward: just check and uncheck what you prefer, and add the extra lines as needed (check in Section(s)).

That's because xfce4 itself is a metapackage, so of course it's going to install everything under the sun.

You'd want a "minimal" Xfce install with the following command (feel free to adjust to your own liking with more or less packages):

sudo apt install xfce4-terminal xfce4-session xfce4-settings xfwm4 xfdesktop4 xfce4-panel xfce4-power-manager thunar --no-install-recommends

In fact, you could do away with xfwm4 and just use something like openbox, i3wm, or fvwm in its place. Hell, even just keep xfce4-panel and use feh or xwallpaper for setting your desktop wallpaper without the need for xfdesktop4. thunar is recommended for full functionality, but you could swap it out for rox-filer or spacefm (not the icky GTK3 build, of course) and still use those for a "desktop" UI.

The point is that Xfce is what you make of it, and it can work for various use cases.

Wake me up when Wayland is "ready" for production use... It's never going to overtake Xorg, no matter what the shills say.

I made a personal list of GTK2-supported programs for Chimaera and Daedalus. Sadly, some approaches might require turning your system into a FrankenDevuan, but it can be worked with.

I purposely keep GTK2 programs such as Leafpad (text editor), Pale Moon (Web browser), Pidgin (IRC), LazPaint (image editor), VeraCrypt 1.24 (file encryption), etc. installed.

I shall soon replace FileZilla (FTP client) with gFTP and Thunderbird (e-mail client) with Claws Mail (Chimaera version is still on GTK2). It might be possible to use Xfce 4.12 on Chimaera or Daedalus, but you have to be very specific with Apt pinning to prevent updating to the newer and shinier 4.16 or 4.18 builds.

LXDE is still the only GTK2 DE available on the latest stable release, so that can be utilized.

Openbox can replace Xfce's WM and replicate much of its functionality with config changes. For compositing, Picom could be used.

The GTK2 build of SpaceFM can also be installed to replace Thunar, Caja, and other file managers, but you must understand that it is a dead project with over two hundred bugs (last official commit was in early 2018, with no further signs of life from the maintainer). Moreover, it will be removed from Devuan as of Excalibur when it goes stable in two years (the latest build for Ceres only ships GTK3 now).

Your best bet is to replace what you can with GTK2 or even Qt (using Qt5ct to skin its programs to look more GTK2-esque).

Otherwise, just go back to any of the first three Devuan releases (Jessie, Ascii, and/or Beowulf). The unfortunate thing is the lack of official support for the first two already, and Beowulf will be archived soon.

Finally, with all of this out of the way, it would have been great if MATE or Xfce forked GTK2 ten years ago. It's too late now. All the more reasons to hate GNOME developers for their lack of respect for the end user. They are by far one of the most incompetent disgraces to the open-source community.

Yes to all of the above. Devuan is 1:1 with Debian except in instances where Systemd would be invoked or a package would be too problematic to fork. The maintained list can be located here.

#/etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged/ daedalus-backports main contrib non-free non-free-firmware

For best results, you are better off just using AMD or Intel GPUs.

Note that if you don't install the daemonless "build" of Logind from the official repositories, this will cripple Polkit (e.g. Pkexec) and restrict your Xfce's session management (you'd only be able to log out). As well, NetworkManager will have to be replaced with Connman. All your KDE packages will be gone.

First thing is to install dummy-logind (prevents most of the packages from being removed), consolekit, seatd, libck-connector0, libpolkit-gobject-consolekit-1-0, udevil (for user-level drive mounting without authentication, with devmon as the daemon you have to execute), and lxqt-sudo (for authentication).

Afterwards, you'll have to look for your packages' binary files that call upon Pkexec to some extent (e.g. Synaptic, Gufw, Timeshift, GSmartControl, GParted) and replace them all with LXQt's version. It's also a good idea to adjust your Polkit rules in /usr/share/polkit-1/.

If you start your Xfce session with Startx, then change your Xinit configuration file used to exec startxfce4 --with-ck-launch.

First, which Devuan version are you using? If it's Chimaera (stable), then I'd avoid mixing and matching different repositories for the best chances at stability. Some of those packages (libssl1.0.0 in particular) are either no longer installable (deprecated) or not available in your main repository. If you were using Daedalus (testing) or Ceres (unstable), you might be able to get away with installing specific DEBs from other branches.

Have you tried to install from the official DEB file (2.18)? Using Ceres (unstable), GDebi tells me that "all dependencies are satisfiable".