Hoping wont make it happen any quicker.

On the other hand, a polite nudge to the relevant Debian maintainer - asking if the changes made were sufficient, or if there is still more to do - may well have a positive impact.

jue-gen, you quoted my entire post (despite it being the immediately preceding message), but didn't actually respond to any of it...?

You haven't said why you want to do this. ("I did it with Debian" is not a reason.)

Testing and Unstable (whether Sid or Ceres) are not an upgrade, they are development tools for those helping to test potential future versions of packages - i.e. software that has yet to be verified as stable and secure.

If one actually wants to help test, great. Or as a learning tool (as above), fine. Other reasons for running Unstable are probably the result of a misunderstanding and would be better served by running something else, but what else depends on the specific reason(s) for running it.

Anyone with good reason to run Devuan Testing or Devuan Unstable should have an understanding of the mechanism through which Debian becomes Devuan. Anyone who understands that process would also understand the potential additional issues involved, and wouldn't need to ask about differences between Sid and Ceres. (Put another way, to know the differences, learn how Devuan works.)

Heh, I don't recall encountering zerofree before - I wonder if that might have been the missing step that stopped some of my attempts from working.

No, but I have spent a significant amount of time trying various solutions that didn't work, before eventually giving up and converting each partition to its own file, with qemu-image convert.

Browsers frequently hide real errors, and complicate things with caches and cookies; usually better to diagnose things directly.

What does curl -Iv localhost:631 say?

Check with ss -ltnp sport 631 (as sudo/root) whether the server is running?

Anything relevant in the logs - i.e: tail /var/log/cups/*_log ?

Nope, it's because they exactly copied what was written in the other thread $mkdir .themes

Since there is no variable "mkdir" it evaluated to empty string, and thus was removed, leaving ".themes" which Bash tried to execute as a command, and since there isn't such a command, it displayed "command not found".

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The command is mkdir .themes - no dollar - just like you didn't put a dollar for the ls -a command.

Yes, the dollar is the prompt - experienced users know that, but new users don't - so it should be explicitly pointed out, or not used - personally, I'll only include a prompt when displaying both input and output. When offering advice for a specific command to run, it's less confusing to not use it. (Especially when one forgets the space and doesn't spot it whilst proofreading. Or writes one command with it and one without.)

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Charon795:
It's a good practice to always verify what a command does before you enter it. Putting "man $mkdir" into a search engine would have clarified that the correct command is "mkdir" and explained what it does. The best source for Devuan is Debian man pages //manpages.debian.org

A dollar at the start of a command is usually the shell prompt (and thus not intended to be typed), but elsewhere in a command it can be a shell variable, and those can significantly change what a command does.

Something else worth pointing out - when a file or directory name starts with a "." it is considered "hidden" and not always displayed. This is why the need for ls -a instead of just ls. If you use a graphical file manager, it will have an option to toggle hidden resources on/off, which you would want to do if managing this folder with such a tool.

Also, if you prefer to reduce the number of files/directories directly in your home, you might prefer to use .local/share/themes instead of .themes

I guess since I didn't specify a font it varies based on whatever the system's default might be - on the system I tested that the +0+6 meant there was enough space, but obviously other fonts need different numbers.

I'm happy to experiment with some fancier variant(s) with colours/borders/shadows/etc and see what people think - is the swoosh with dots emblem from that page still valid?

Why are you saying "for some reason", "appears to", etc?

Debian made a clear and definite decision to move non-free firmware into its own non-free-firmware section, so it can be used in the installer, and removes the need for enabling the non-free section for everyone that only enables it for the firmware.

i.e. Unless one explicitly needs the non-free section, they can replace it with non-free-firmware.

There are several Windows-styled themes at https://b00merang-project.github.io/windows - though their Windows 11 one is "coming soon".

The Windows 10 one is supported on:

Installation appears to be download a zip file and extract to a folder (though of course one should still check there are no unexpected files in such an archive).

The release announcement URL is //www.devuan.org/os/announce/daedalus-release-announce-2023-08-14

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Also, I don't see a message on Devuan Announce mailing list - if I didn't visit the forums regularly, I'd have subscribed to that list hoping to get notified...

Is it related to this https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=5574 ?

Ooops, sorry, I thought I'd seen a 2022 release mentioned but not sure where that was, and it does seem to have gone quiet. Since it appears to be a Dyne project, and (I think) there are Dyne people involved in Devuan, perhaps someone can confirm the status?

It might be worthwhile reaching out to Tails and Whonix projects to ask them directly whether they actually need systemd, or if there are build instructions that could be applied against a Devuan base.