I must confess, I delete most supplied wallpapers before opening the wallpaper chooser, I find they slow down the chooser, and the login screen if it has wallpaper slideshow. On mint I delete all the mint-backgrounds-name and the three largest from the mint-artwork package.

It got silly, I got excited. Have ordered a mini pcie-msata converter and a 3x5 128GB fast ssd, to put in the eee pc 904 disney special, and then fill her full of sweet music, over the airwaves, at 2.7MB/s, which is considerably faster than PCM.
Also hoping she will boot cinnamon in under one minute with a faster ssd.

Warpinator has a multi-state taskbar icon, fiddly to change, but I will.

Ah, thanks, I will try installing GUFW. Were any of your machines using ifupdown?

The solution is to write your own desktop entirely, it's the only way to be sure.
Oh, and don't forget to write your own init, to be on the safe side.

Look, write your own kernel or it's your fault

New info, a new approach to trying to reproduce bug from a debian base:
Debian Bullseye netinstall, skipping 'install software' stage, chroot /target and apt install sysvinit-core elogind
Boot system and point sources to Devuan Chimaera, upgraded to devuan, rebooted.
Then installed xorg, mate desktop, pulseaudio.
The bug was not reproducible.
It seems the bug doesn't happen when starting from debian, no matter how early you change over to devuan.

I can happy. Just tried netinstall of debian bullseye, but took advice to open a terminal before the 'select and install software' stage, did chroot into /target, apt install sysvinit-core elogind libpam-elogind, then continued as normal with the install. This is on the asus eee pc 701, originally a machine that ran debian and runit in 2007.

I haven't seen linux working this well on this machine since LMDE 2! It has no problem connecting to wifi, or continuing if no wifi, all audio settings persist, and it hibernates reliably even when the grub timeout is set to zero.
Can't wait to try this approach with LMDE 5. Hoping it will work.

I accidentally did this last year. It's interesting, but even if I'd got it working, I'd have had little confidence in it. The horrors!

Go via Beowulf, or clean install, or wait six months.

After a little detective work and guesswork, looking at devuan specific files that are dependencies of mate-settings-daemon, I would suggest maybe either dbus or libdbus-1-3 are the problem. But how to know for sure, and which?

Thank you, and can one use "1" in place of "true"?