You're entitled to think whatever you want, of course.
My opinion on defragging ext* remains unshaken all the same though, and it's nothing to do with being a "purist". Ext* simply doesn't have the same rampant fragmentation issues that FAT and NTFS do.

At this point, I'm really starting to suspect ReFS is vaporware.

Solaris native, actually. But it does have a very nice BSD port.

Sun Microsystems released the ZFS source under their own take on a FOSS licence (the CDDL) shortly before they were devoured by Oracle, and actively developed ports are available for most BSD variants, MacOS and Linux.
Unfortunately It's not entirely clear whether the CDDL is compatible with the GPL, and there have been claims both ways. The FSF says it isn't, while the SFLC and Ubuntu claim that it is... As such, most GNU/Linux distros don't ship ZFS out of the box, requiring users to install it later.

For personal use the licence shenanigans is largely irrelevant, and full support on debian-based distros is just an 'apt install zfs-dkms zfsutils' away. You can even boot a GNU/Linux system from a ZFS pool, though I can't comment on Devuan's support for that specifically.

Uhh, defragging a volume causes "excessive" wear as well... But hey, if you really want to do that kind of thing, go nuts.

Yes and no, and it's a complete pain in the ass.
Fortunately, TK-Glitch maintains a wine build-system with features backported from proton, and compatibility is usually just as good as the real thing.
AFAIK there are no convenient binaries for debian-based distros (TK-Glitch is an Arch user BTW), but if you don't want to compile stuff yourself you can get also get them through Lutris. This is probably the easiest, most compatible option outside of installing Steam, and it's in the Devuan repos...
Or just swipe the Lutris wine tarballs for use with your frontend of choice. I get the distinct impression the Lutris devs don't like people doing this (an attitude that pisses me off no end), but they aren't particularly well hidden.

Aside, if you want optimal gaming performance with Wine, you'll probably want a kernel with the fsync and/or futex2 patchset. These can also be found on TK-Glitch's github, and IIRC the Xanmod and Liquorix kernels include them if you don't want to patch/build by hand.
I can't comment on how well those kernels behave with Devuan though, since the only machine I actually game on runs Gentoo.

IME the biggest problem with gaming on GNU/Linux isn't compatibility or performance any more (I get framerates within 1-2% of native), it's the rise of intrusive kernel-level anti-cheat / DRM.
Unfortunately there's no easy fix for that, so if your MMO habits include games that install ring-0 malware for "security" purposes or auto-ban wine users for "cheating", you'll probably want to keep a windows partition around...
Or better yet, vote with your wallet and just refuse to buy games that spy on you or try to hijack your system.

That's why there are so many warnings WRT the storage saving vs memory usage trade-off of dedup. In my case that trade isn't worth it, so I don't enable it.
IIRC the 64GB of RAM in my machine cost me ~120USD, and frankly I only installed 64 because I could. For a reasonable home-server pool size, ZFS (without dedup) will run just fine with 4.
More is better of course, as with most things. ZFS will use whatever it can get for its adaptive cache.

Of bigger concern hardware-wise is ECC and a UPS, though if you're serious about data integrity you'll have those already, regardless of filesystem choice.

On a Devuan-powered server, of course.

More specifically, on a largish (24TB usable) RAIDZ6 pool, served via NFS, SMB, and nextcloud. That machine lives in my house, where it should.
No Google, no Microsoft, no random "cloud" filestores. Includes webmail, dropbox-like filehosting & link sharing, PIM (contacts, calendar, tasks, notes) synchronisation to desktop and mobile, browser bookmark sync, password management, automated full-system backups for several other machines, the whole nine yards.

It doesn't have to, but it's probably a good idea.

There used to be a couple of defragmentation tools for ext4, but in 20+ years as a GNU/Linux user and unrepentant data-hoarder, I've never needed or wanted them.
Yes, you will get some fragmentation if you run your storage at 90+% capacity. The easiest answer is "don't do that", but even if you do the performance impact is nothing like the nightmare you get on a fragmented NTFS volume.

I will plug ZFS at any opportunity. It's kinda heavy on hardware requirements (particularly memory if you want good performance), but it more than makes up for that in featureset, reliability, and data integrity. No other filesystem comes even remotely close.
If you don't want to deal with ZFS (and out-of tree kernel modules), there's nothing wrong with ext4 on top of RAID and/or a sensible backup strategy either.

I never really had a life in the MS ecosystem, at least not the way it is now. The last version of Windows that stored any of my personal data was '98.
To be fair, I do still have an XP install on my old netbook, but that's strictly a tool for dealing with ancient hardware and holds no personal information whatsoever.

Oh, but it is

23-ish years here, and mine started out as a Slackware install, on a 486, in a (literal) pizza box.
Now it's an ebay-special dual xeon, shoehorned into a desktop case. New times, same old recycled hardware policy.

Indeed. Seconded.

Yes.

I'm running 5 samsungs, 4 kingstons, 2 intels, an ancient OCZ, and a couple of random (micron OEMs IIRC) drives in various applications ATM, and I haven't had any problems with any of them... Besides a couple of the kingstons griping about being out of write endurance, but then they've been doing that for about 6 months now and they're still working fine.
That's a very small sample size of course, but the samsungs and kingstons regularly get the same kind of thrashing that killed those crucial drives, and they don't even blink.

I don't know anything about WD SSDs since I've never owned one, and as far as Gigabyte goes... TBH I'm pretty biased there. I've considered anything Gigabyte to be pure refuse since about 2004, and I don't know if quality has improved in the intervening years because I haven't bought from them since.

If I had to pick, I'd probably say Samsung or Intel of you want performance, and Kingston if you want dirt cheap without being completely horrible. But I'd also say take with a large grain of salt, because I don't have any real data to back it up.

Yup, and it was a Crucial as well. Overheated and died under a sustained write workload despite being in a fan-cooled drive cage that didn't exceed 25C ambient.

As far as the terminal and such goes, set and export the LANG (and/or other related vars, see man 7 environ and man 7 locale) environment variable somewhere in your profile or shell rc files, same as on Debian.
I don't know what DE or other graphical stuff you're running, so I can't really comment on that.

I'm running nextcloud on beowulf, with PHP 7.4.
The trick is that pkgs.tdrnetworks doesn't include everything, so you'll need packages.sury.org in your sources as well, i.e.

deb https://packages.sury.org/php/ buster main
deb https://pkgs.tdrnetworks.com/apt/devuan beowulf main

You'll likely also want something like:

Package: *
Pin: release o=deb.sury.org
Pin-Priority: 200

(or any priority lower than that assigned to tdrnetworks) in /etc/apt/preferences so the fixed packages take precedence, and stuff from sury.org is only pulled in if it doesn't exist elsewhere.

Claws on my XFCE netbook, Kmail on my KDE desktop, and roundcube webmail if I'm working remotely. All talking to my self-hosted (devuan, obviously ) imap server.

Yeah, I do remember that. I kinda arrived at FDN just as or just before many of the more knowledgable users left.
I also remember when FDN was literally a server under someone's desk, run entirely without interference from the Debian devs.

Now it feels like there's all of about 5 people over there who know what they're talking about and still try to help, and the rest is a windows-noob echo-chamber.
Personally I don't mind noobs per-se, but there's a level of pigheaded unwillingness to self-help which makes me far more inclined to just chill with some popcorn.

Between the latest iteration of the "be nice" CoC, the social-media forum "upgrades" complete with "likes", and the unending torrent of frankly terrible advice from the blind leading the blind... Let's just say it saps ones will to engage constructively.

I absolutely do not want to see the same happen here. If Devuan is indeed "hurting it's own cause" by not being as easy for lazy windows-refugees as Ubuntu, that's totally fine.
I'd much prefer to converse with a handful of motivated users than a horde of lazy people expecting a free edition of Windows anyway.
IME the latter is easily identifiable by their belief that they're owed something just by using the distro, and that market-share matters to anyone. OP looks like a pretty good case in point to me.

Whatever happened to the old "Leave your commercial software expectation baggage at the door, and roll up your sleeves because you'll need to get your hands dirty" adage anyway?

True, though many more have seemingly just vanished.

IME KDE5/Plasma isn't too bad. It's not quite as configurable as KDE3 was, but it's pretty flexible and can certainly still be set up for the traditional desktop paradigm.

I can't really comment on it's "lightness" WRT Debian/Devuan, but it's pretty light over here on Gentoo. There are advantages to compiling in only the stuff you actually want.

GNOME on the other hand... I've never understood the direction GNOME went, and it gets more bizarre with every release.

Slackware 7.1. Same as I ran back in the day when my daily driver was similar hardware.
Modern Debian/Devuan is far to fat for the box in question. Even a CLI-only install would be barely usable, and modern X is a no-show as proper support for the GPU chipset disappeared somewhere around 2002...
AFAIK the latest distro that still has the required XFree86 3.x is Slackware 8.1, but that ships KDE 3.0.something, and I don't think KDE3.x is going to be much fun with a 100Mhz CPU.

Also modern Devuan kernels do not fit on floppy disks, and the old IDE driver for the VLB chipset is gone too.

It's probably possible to run KDE1.x on a modern distro though, for some definition of possible... I expect it would need some patching for compiler / libc changes at the very least.

Bloat!
Slackware 7.1 consumes <4MB RAM at the CLI with default services loaded, and somewhere around 18MB at a KDE 1.1 desktop.