I had many problems with polkit (including the USB mount-unmount and "unable to determine the session" issues) when I tried running Devuan Jessie without a display manager. After many hours of troubleshooting and trial-and-error--over several days--I gave up and gave lightdm a shot.

Well, all the problems vanished once lightdm was installed. I feel mildly bad for not actually learning enough about polkit to manually fix the problems, but on the upside I got fully operational and put a stop to my headache and hair loss.

What DE and what (if any) display manager are you using? If you are not currently using a display manager, may I suggest you give lightdm a shot? If it solves your polkit-related problems, you can easily configure lightdm for autologin and it will stay completely out of your way.

A simpler way to know if it is free software or not is to discover* the software's license, then check this list: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html

The intent of the software developer comes to a point in the chosen license. Software under a free license = free software.

* Hopefully the license is prominently listed on the project's website. Not finding the license on the project's website is usually a bad sign, but not always. If you can't find the license on the project's website, check Wikipedia. If Wikipedia has an article about the project, the license will be right in the infobox.

I'm not too worried. We have a critical mass of smart, freedom-loving folk in the GNU/Linux community who value traditional workflows (e.g., Devuan developers), so we'll figure something out when we get there. I myself will roll up my sleeves and figure it out if need be. Sorry I can't be more helpful at this point--I only looked into this cursorily.

I have never actually used Wayland yet. Truth is I have absolutely no complaints regarding X11, so will put off Wayland for as long as I possibly can (forever if possible).

This is wrong and it makes me angry.

Why not just scrap GNU/Linux? All the world needs is Windows, MacOS, and GNU/systemd. Even then, our overlords at Redmond, Cupertino, and Red Hat may get together and decide that with these three OSs we still have too much choice.

@hughparker1: You don't need sudo to make it executable. Also, for security reasons I recommend not running any web browser as superuser. As to what directory to put the AppImage in, it is completely up to you--an AppImage does not require installation and contains everything it needs inside that one file, which can be run from any directory. It is truly a "portable application".

In case any newbies need a more explicit step-by-step of what to do from the command line:

dest_dir="$HOME/bin" # dest_dir can be anything you want
mkdir -p "$dest_dir"
cd "$dest_dir"
wget https://bintray.com/probono/AppImages/download_file?file_path=Firefox-53.0.2.glibc2.3.4-x86_64.AppImage -O Firefox53.AppImage
chmod a+x Firefox53.AppImage
./Firefox53.AppImage

At that point, you will be asked whether you would like a .desktop file (~/.local/share/applications/appimagekit-firefox.desktop) to be created automatically for you so that you can run the Firefox appimage directly from your applications menu.

That's it At the most, you will be adding a single additional file to your system (either ~/.local/share/applications/appimagekit-firefox.desktop or a little marker file called ~/.local/share/appimagekit/Firefox_no_desktopintegration).

The advantage of using AppImages is the extreme simplicity of one app = one file. The only disadvantage I can think of is not having the convenience of getting security fixes through your package manager.

P.S. In case you'd like to see what's contained inside the AppImage:

./Firefox53.AppImage --appimage-extract

Thanks for the info, smoki. Sad to hear. Fortunately, as long as Devuan follows a fixed release model, I won't have to fix theme breakages more than once every few years. I can live with that.

I'm still having dropped wifi connections at least daily, despite using nohwcrypt=1.

Nevertheless, this may be a red herring and totally unrelated to Devuan, wicd, or network-manager: Our VPN provider made some recent changes right around the time I switched to Devuan. I have updated the VPN configuration in our routers.

Sorry for the noise.

Thanks, smoki. Yes, I figured the culprit was between the screen and the chair

I will keep an eye on this and make sure it runs warning- and error-free. If I figure out what I did to cause the breakage and if it turns out to be something interesting, I'll post it here.

@malinas: Yes, that is a limitation of the script as written. I don't listen to music at the computer, so that wasn't an issue for me. It would be trivial, however, to add some logic to *not* send the nudge if audacious (or any other application used specifically for listening to music) is running.

@smoki: Indeed, LCDs have no need of screensaver--I have xscreensaver on my daily driver laptop only for ornamental purposes. On the other hand, I have an old laptop that I converted into a media player (including IR receiver!) which lives permanently connected to a 60'' plasma TV. In this case, a reliable screensaver is an absolute must-have. Since I started using this script, I no longer have to depend on a manual process to turn screensaver off and on when watching videos in a web browser.

I have found a new home in Devuan, too. Know how you feel. Welcome to the form, david!

Yes, it should work just fine: It doesn't matter if what's generating sound is a video, a game, or a chat. If there is sound, the script keeps screensaver at bay.