Sometimes we do something slightly different and we are not aware of doing it. I'm quite sure that there are good technical explanaitions on what you are talking about.

For more that 25 years I've been learning a lot from what was apparently a malfunction of my UNIX-like system: from Coherent all the way to Devuan. Almost always I was wrong, not the system.

In this very forum I read every day a lot of expert advice.

The explanaition of HoaS about the delay of your system at boot is excelent. I spent a rewarding amount of time reading it. Thanks, HoaS.

My main desktop has a 2TB spinning disk that holds /home; I backup it on a weekly basis, rotating four external disks plugged through SATA. All partitions are ext*. No trouble in more that 20 years; exceptions: disks eventually fail, you HAD to backup all your data beforehand.

I've two servers at home: same policy as desktop, also no problems. 20 years and counting.

Defrag? Nope.

I have a bunch of USB devices with instalers of a few versions of Devuan, both 32 bits and 64 bits, and live rescue systems, just in case.
A solution like Ventoy could save me a few sticks. Using it is in my "to do" list.

From https://github.com/Boomaga/boomaga:

Please, look through the error messages in CUPS logs

Any message there?

With or without pulseaudio in your system?

Welcome to the forum

I don't argue about personal tastes, if you want to move away form KDE, it is up to you, of course.

I just would like to say that I'm a KDE user for 15+ years and I could customize KDE in Beowulf to my taste. I've instaled it on several relatives' boxes, with no complaints so far. It feels like and old desktop, but is modern enough in the backend.

So, may be you can play a bit with the almost infinite posibilities of KDE customizations.

Note: I dont use metapackages.

Please check the size of your swap partition. It should be as big as your RAM o bigger.

+1

Still, I would like to know what the hell is going on the Élisabeth laptop. I've been intrigued since her first messages (but unable to help) and I feel that still nobody of us really knows what is happening. May be a bug in BIOS firmware? I said that just like a curiosity beause life is short and Devuan is already running in Élisabeth computer.

Good to know. Congratulations

Good point. I did it every time I had to use an stardard Ubuntu system.

Ageed. My Devuan syetems don't have sudo installed.

It is under "Set up users and passwords".

If you don't allow root entry, your system is ala Ubuntu or MacOS, you need sudo in front of any administrative command (I don't like it) and you can't login as root.
If you allow root entry, you can write just there your root password. Then, you can login as root or use the su command to became root.

I'm sorry if you already know all this.

That is always my course of action. Once you have a system up and running, even minimal, you can use the apt family you install whatever you need. I find pciutils useful to see what is your exact WiFi card.