Hello:

As I have mentioned a few times, these days my main box runs on Devuan 5 / Daedalus, which I update and back-up once a week to a recovered WD-MBL running on OpenWRT:

$ uname -a
Linux devuan 6.1.0-38-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.1.147-1 (2025-08-02) x86_64 GNU/Linux
$ 

No issues save those which may have appeared while doing some housekeeping, more than anything to clean up stray matter / files / unnecessary packages left over from my system's dist-upgrade path beginning with ascii or Jesse. As it has been a while, I cannot exactly recall when, but it must have been ~ 05/2017.

I have recently seen quite a few posts from members (some quite eager) to do an upgrade to Devuan 6 / Excalibur, which I expect must be for a variety of valid reasons.

As for me, I cannot at least for the time being, find one to move from Daedalus, much the same way I was not able to find one to move from Beowulf with which I had no issues and was quite comfortable with (but was being mothballed) to Chimaera, process which was nothing short of a train-wreck for which I hold XFCE mainly responsible.

A last resort effort by way of yet another dist-upgrade to Devuan 5 / Daedalus straightened most everything out and thus avoided a tiresome roll-back or clean installation.

My box is a fully upgraded ca. 2008 BIOS boot only (ie: no secure boot crap) Sun Ultra24 workstation with an early version of the infamous Intel MEI which I keep at bay (?) by blacklisting the respective modules, and an Intel Q9550 CPU with 8.0Gb RAM which has been running perfectly well on Linux since late 2015 and on Devuan Linux since ~ 05/2017.

The MB has PCIe v2 / PCI v2.3 slots, USB2.0 controller and GbE.
Twin Quadro FX 580 cards feeding three 19" monitors run (well enough) with the latest nouveau driver and the LSI SAS1068E and the 2940U/UW SAS/SCSI controllers have worked perfectly well from the very first Linux installation.

So it would seem that (?) there is nothing that would require much of a dist-upgrade as I expect that any and all applicable Linux drivers / modules* are quite mature by now.

That said, I have no plan (or willingness) to spend my pension money on new (unneeded) hardware as everything works as expected.
My only (small) peeve is that the nouveau driver could do much better at running a 3x monitor desktop but that is about it.

In the 10+ years I have been running on Linux I have seen the size of each release grow and grow and cannot but wonder what more is in store.
eg:
Devuan Chimaera netinstall *.iso: 372.00 MB - UEFI installer:  0.754 MB
Devuan Daedalus netinstall *.iso: 477.80 MB - UEFI installer:  23.00 MB
30X more code was added to the UEFI partition on the road between Chimaera and Daedalus.

Frankly, I do not think I can expect anything in the way of improvements for my hardware.

And after reading this I cannot but to agree with this note:

Not that I am wanting to do a dist-upgrade as I will probably be able to get by (like I did with Beowulf) by using a backported kernel if necessary but eventually the time will come to move forward albeit with the bare metal in my box in perfect working condition and unchanged, save maybe larger/faster drives or newer monitors.

I guess that, besides @greenjeans and I, there may be more members in a similar situation from which I would like to hear an opinion.

Best,

A.

* corrections welcome.

Hello:

From today's edition of The Register:
------------------------------------------------
Star leaky app of the week: StarDict
Fun feature found in Debian 13: send your selected text to China – in plaintext
by Liam Proven - Fri 8 Aug 2025 // 15:29 UTC
------------------------------------------------

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/08/ … p_of_week/

Best,

A.

Hello:

Having had reasonable success in ridding my box of unnecessary gnome files, I still have two to solve: policykit-1-gnome and pinentry-gnome3.
I have taken care to check on all dependencies but you never know, I will post any complaints I get.

The remaining gnome related files are either by choice (gnome-disk-utility) or dependencies of (timeshift.

This is what aptitude prints out when asked about:

1. policykit-1-gnome

$ aptitude why policykit-1-gnome
i   thunar Recommends policykit-1-gnome | polkit-1-auth-agent
$ 

and
2. pinentry-gnome3

$ aptitude why pinentry-gnome3
i   gnupg           Depends  gpg-agent (< 2.2.40-1.1.1~)
i A gpg-agent       Depends  pinentry-curses | pinentry 
i A pinentry-gnome3 Provides pinentry                   
$ 

If I understand correctly, the alternative to policykit-1-gnome would be polkit-1-auth-agent and the alternative to pinentry-gnome3 would be pinentry-curses.

Unfortunately, the first alternative is a virtual package provided, among others, by policykit-1-gnome.

See here: https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/po … auth-agent

So unless some other option is available, that will be it.

But pinentry-curses is available ...

$ apt list | grep pinentry-curses
--- snip ---
pinentry-curses/stable 1.2.1-1 amd64
--- snip ---
$ 

... and can be installed to replace pinentry-gnome3.

$ aptitude why pinentry-curses
i   gnupg     Depends gpg-agent (< 2.2.40-1.1.1~)
i A gpg-agent Depends pinentry-curses | pinentry 
$ 

Q: which would be the safe / proper manner to replace pinentry-gnome3 with pinentry-curses and not wreak havok in my system?

Thanks in advance.

Best,

A.

Hello:

From today's edition of The Register:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Microsoft admits it 'cannot guarantee' data sovereignty
Under oath in French Senate, exec says it would be compelled – however unlikely – to pass local customer info to US admin.
by Paul Kunert  @The Register
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/25/ … guarantee/

So ...
What else is new?

Best,

A.