That's a thought that occurred to me. There is more to system drivers than video, but I wonder what the complexity of creating an install that works on a few different systems would be. Not a generic "Live CD" that has to probe and select a bunch of drivers every time it boots, but something that understands and runs on a few system configurations that I happen to have. Since I have drive trays that allow easy swapping of HDs, it would be cool to have a single OS setup that I could move around between machines.

This thread has me thinking I need to learn how to do this 'windowing environment only' without a desktop style of computer use.

The feedback here is not encouraging. There is a multi-pronged effort underway to capture FOSS into the standard 'mainstream' tech revenue channels and there doesn't seem to be much push-back.

Thoughts:

* Firefox has been dying, in large part due to complacency by Mozilla as well as Google's machination to make Chrome dominant. Could this push to cripple ad-blockers be a possible 'big break' for Mozilla and Firefox? When millions of people who have gotten used to browsing without constant ad-spam find they are forced to see ads, will there be a mass movement back to Firefox?

* If this does not occur, it may be 'fork time' again. Someone ought to copy the Firefox code base and start a new project to have a browser genuinely free of corporate control.

* The Wayland/X thing is more abstruse. It's about an underlying layer of the system, not a user-facing program. The concept "mature product" just doesn't seem to mean anything anymore. Change for the sake of change (and for the sake of revenue) is now so normalized that most people don't see the problem, and there probably won't a a single major event like the upcoming ad-blockalypse on Chrome to galvanize resistance. But there will be a larger, long-term price if the reports of the bugginess of Wayland are true. Can "we" (the common users of Linux who are not infrastructure techies) apply some sort of pressure on desktop developers to always keep backwards compatibility with X? I see that even XFCE has been making plans to adopt Wayland. This is the last major desktop to not already have been ruined by 'featurism'. If it gets sucked into the bloat wave I dunno what I could use. Maybe it would be time to fork that also? Cinnamon and Mate have worked out relatively well.

Nope, same old same old. Every time the system boots, I get the error:

[    0.862162] udevd[118]: Error running install command 'modprobe -i nvidia-current ' for module nvidia: retcode 1

Looks like the nVidia drivers just cannot be properly installed in Devuan. But the system does run, so at least it's a minor error, not a system ruining disaster.

You misunderstand what I am referring to. I am not complaining about the 'no non-free software by default' policy, I am referring to a permanent bug in the install of said software if you choose to do so. viz.

https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=4802

Yes, I rebooted and it booted from the USB drive and started the installer. Then it complained it could not 'mount' the install media to get something it needed. Very odd.

This is the 4 GB 'desktop' ISO. I like a full install, don't want to have to download too much.

But it's on an ISO image. I'd have to edit the ISO. Kinda extreme for a small glitch. Though I found a fix with the sh invocation, someone else had another idea. Edit fstab and replace the 'auto' attribute on the cdrom mount with 'exec' and then it should run. Apparently this is the mistake that Devuan makes compared to CentOS. Using 'auto' on the cdrom mount.

/dev/sr0        /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,exec     0       0

After literally removing the virtual drive and re-adding it, the machine still won't run the additions CD. I get a popup that says "Error autorunning software" and "cannot find the autorun program"...

This is the exact same CD that just ran in the CentOS VM.

Manually running it as root doesn't work:
/media/cdrom/auotrun.sh returns "permission denied"