The host system does not need to be lvm to mount the data lvm. You just need lvm2 to be installed, and you can open the volume and mount it with a few commands.

A howto on keeping the configs separate on a shared home would probably be useful for a lot of people.

Yeah, we hang out in the Devuan Derivatives section.
https://dev1galaxy.org/viewforum.php?id=9

Can anyone reproduce this? I just tried and failed. I chose English, American English, and Israel for language, keyboard and timezone. On reboot, 'date' tells me that it's 17:36 IDT. By my count, it's 14:36 UTC. Looks like it works the way it's supposed to work.

I think it's a gtk3 issue, not necessarily meld. See if changing the desktop theme makes a difference. Since it mentions the scrollbar, maybe try installing or uninstalling gtk3-nooverlayscrollbar or gtk3-nocsd.

The user does not get to control the order of package installation during the install of the operating system. That's up to the package manager, which has to resolve dependencies of the chosen metapackages. The behavior of the alternatives system will make more sense when you read the man page for update-alternatives.

In fact, a default window manager was selected for you. The lxqt devs thought they should double-check with you, because you had more than one window manager installed. They presented you with a list, and on that list the pre-selected window manager was highlighted. All you had to do was press enter or click OK. If you think that behavior should change, you could file a bug report. I'm guessing that behavior comes from the lxqt authors, upstream of debian.

LXQt was probably the last desktop to be installed, so the alternatives system set it as the default, thus replacing any previous default settings. That's normal behavior of the alternatives system. You can change the default desktop by running update-alternatives --config x-session-manager and if needed, you can change the default window manager with update-alternatives --config x-window-manager

If you only install one desktop environment, you get that desktop's default window manager automatically. If you have multiple window managers installed, the desktop software has the logic coded into it to ask you if the additional window manager is there because you want to use it.

Installiing multiple desktop environments used to be a simple matter. But that doesn't seem to be the case now. It would work better if they were installed one at a time, so any conflicts might be more apparent.

Look in /var/log/installer/syslog for task-xfce-desktop task-cinnamon-desktop and task-lxqt-desktop to see which were checked at the tasksel window in the installer.

I got no icons on the desktop in my cinnamon install. If I go into preferences and set the desktop to show those items, their names show correctly.

Look inside those text files to see what's there. If they are actual .desktop files, they should look similar to the files in /usr/share/applications. Are they functional when you click on them?

It sounds like lxqt is coded in such a way that it will use just about any window manager. It can recognize a few if they are installed, and ask you which one to use. I recall that lxde lets you easily change the window manager, and I recall long ago being given a choice of wm in gnome 2.x (sawtooth or metacity?).

This is a good thing. It means the software was written to be interoperable with lots of different things. In such cases, the user can usually ignore the choices and just press enter to get a sane default.

The current chimaera installer isos (and live isos) are alpha level. They should work essentially the same as previous installer isos. That they don't is no surprise. The default desktop is supposed to be xfce, and if you select something else, you should get what you select.

What boxes did you check/uncheck at the tasksel window, and did you install with or without a network mirror?

Here is my procedure for a debootstrap install. See 'man debootstrap' for other options.

chroot-dir is the directory where you want to do the debootstrap install. If you mount a separate volume for that, then chroot-dir is the mountpoint. Call it whatever you want.

debootstrap --arch amd64 chimaera chroot-dir http://deb.devuan.org/merged

# Copy files to the new system. Example:
cp /boot/grub/splash.png chroot-dir/boot/grub/

Mount some things and chroot into the new system to make additions and changes.

mount --bind /proc chroot-dir/proc
mount --bind /sys chroot-dir/sys
mount --bind /dev chroot-dir/dev
mount --bind /dev/pts chroot-dir/dev/pts

chroot /chroot-dir

Install kernel and other packages
Install grub or other bootloader  (run grub-install and update-grub)
Edit configs
Create root password
Create user

Leave the chroot:

exit

Unmount stuff:

umount -l chroot-dir/dev/pts
umount -l chroot-dir/dev/
umount -l chroot-dir/sys
umount -l chroot-dir/proc

# And if it's a separate volume:
umount -l chroot-dir

Sorry, I got distracted and forgot about this one. I didn't see anything odd with the usual suspects (policykit, et. al.) but I also don't know exactly where the break is between when stuff worked and when it didn't. I'm also not familiar with some of the apt options you used, so I don't know if that caused anything weird to happen.