I really don't know what they are talking about. It looks like openrc already provides its own start-stop-daemon.

apt-file list openrc
...
openrc: /lib/rc/sh/start-stop-daemon.sh

Oh wow. It makes sense once I figured out that the list of metapackage names does not contain any metapackage names, and that the list of Descriptions does contain metapackage names.

Good idea. I have a note in the config file that says to make sure all the necessary cryptsetup packages are installed, but I don't list them, and that note is out of sight. Also, cryptsetup-initramfs is a Suggests, not a Recommends, so you still wouldn't have gotten it if you had not excluded Recommends.

As others suggested, start with a minimal install and add what you want. If you exclude Recommends and avoid metapackages like the task-* packages, you will have a better time removing any parts you don't want. That's how I make Refracta isos https://get.refracta.org. I'm pretty sure Exe GNU/linux is also made that way (with Trinity Desktop) and some of the other devuan re-spin distros are lighter than the full task-* experience.

$ apt show task-xfce-desktop
Package: task-xfce-desktop
Version: 3.68+devuan4u1
Priority: optional
Section: tasks
Source: tasksel
Origin: Devuan
Maintainer: Devuan Dev Team <devuan-dev@lists.dyne.org>
Installed-Size: 9,216 B
Depends: tasksel (= 3.68+devuan4u1), task-desktop, xfce4, slim | lightdm
Recommends: xfce4-goodies, xfce4-power-manager, xfce4-terminal, mousepad, default-dbus-session-bus | dbus-session-bus, xsane, parole, quodlibet, atril, tango-icon-theme, network-manager-gnome | connman-gtk | cmst, synaptic, libreoffice-writer, libreoffice-calc, libreoffice-impress, libreoffice-help-en-us, mythes-en-us, hunspell-en-us, hyphen-en-us, system-config-printer, orca, libreoffice-gtk3
Download-Size: 1,308 B
APT-Sources: http://deb.devuan.org/merged chimaera/main amd64 Packages
Description: Xfce

I don't think there will be any official virtual images. There are a couple you can find by searching the web, but it's not clear who made those images.

For a secure environment, you can just boot a live-iso in a virtual machine. Once you're there, you could also install it to a virtual hard disk and make your own place for testing apps.

Where are you seeing wayland coming in? I just tried a simulated upgrade in a ceres VM that's a couple months behind, and it's not showing up. I also tried a simulated install of mate and it doesn't show up there, either. There are a few libwayland-somethings installed, but I assume they do nothing since I'm running xorg.

For GTK-3, I'm not worrying about it. I'm experimenting with lxqt in anticipation of GTK-4 and -5. (shudder)

Maybe installing gnome-keyring will do it.

Description: GNOME keyring services (daemon and tools)
 gnome-keyring is a daemon in the session, similar to ssh-agent,
 and other applications can use it to store passwords and other
 sensitive information.
 .
 The program can manage several keyrings, each with its own master
 password, and there is also a session keyring which is never stored to
 disk, but forgotten when the session ends.

sysvinit is just a dummy transitional package. Use "sysvinit-core" instead of "sysvinit" in the above command.

In newer versions of grub, os-prober is disabled by default. Edit /etc/default/grub to enable (un-disable) os-prober. Like this:

# If your computer has multiple operating systems installed, then you
# probably want to run os-prober. However, if your computer is a host
# for guest OSes installed via LVM or raw disk devices, running
# os-prober can cause damage to those guest OSes as it mounts
# filesystems to look for things.
GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false

And then run update-grub

Note: if you booted into devuan from mx's grub, you'll need to run 'grub-install' from devuan.

If you're using gpt with bios boot instead of uefi, you'll also need a special partition for that. i think it's called bios_grub in gparted and ef02 in gdisk. Needs to be 1mb and have no filesystem on it.

Time for dinner. Yell if this doesn't make sense.

Nice work, Altoid. No, there's no point in continuing. At least their last statement is more accurate than the earlier one.

There must be something wrong with whatever generates that list. There's no systemd package in devuan.

root@ceres:/# apt policy systemd
systemd:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: (none)
  Version table:

Same as the rest of the banned packages.
https://pkgmaster.devuan.org/bannedpackages.txt

One way to get into this situation would be to rsync /DATA to /media/storage/ when nothing is mounted at /media/storage. Then when you do mount something there, it will hide /media/storage/DATA.

To fix it, you could get fancy with overlay mounts so that DATA did not get covered, but moving it out as already suggested is a much better idea.

'locate' shows you what it found the last time updatedb ran, which might be different from what files exist now. updatedb usually runs once a day.