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.

It may not be as silly as it sounds; they are usually different versions, names o links of what seems the same library. Have you tried ldd yourbinary?

Long time ago I explained in a course about Debian how install X server and probing it working using the order X before installing any graphics login program. The course was very slow paced; nowadays we all can work much faster because everything works much better than 20 years ago, but knowing the basics is always useful.

May be a problem of names of the interfaces. I would try net.ifnames=0 on the kernel parameters.

I'm sorry, but I don't remember the price; I just remember that it was far out of my budget. Years later I could buy a Sinclair QL, my first computer.

We are far off topic, but I like it in this thread, because I'm a trekkie

Maybe OpenBSD were the logical choice...

RNE Clásica. TDT broadcast from national radio of Spain, classic channel.

Welcome to the forum. In every aspect of life we can find absolute experts: good for us

Can you connect from another machine?

I like this topic very much. I used to install systems for high school centers. So, always interested in what is really needed, but I dont want bloatware.

Now, I'm retired, but still active in the sense of working on personal projects.

I think that your question have very different answers depending on the different needs of everyone. Anyway, this is my personal list, incomplete for sure:

On a desktop:

Terminal: Konsole.
Shell: bash.
Graphical file management: Dolphin.
Text editor: nice editor and geany.
Office program: LibreOffice.
Web Browser: Firefox.
Email client: Thunderbird.
Document viewer: Okular.
Media viewer: VLC and mplayer.
Image viewer: Gwenview and qiv.
C compiler: gcc.
Python and Perl interpreters: the one on the distro.
LaTeX and Asymptote compilers.
PDF managing: PDFtk.
Audio managing: Audacity.
Graphics managing: The GIMP.
3D creation: OpenSCAD.
Database managing: sqlite3.
SSH CLI client and gFTP.
SSH server.

On a server:

Shell: bash.
Text editor: nice editor.
Web server: Apache.
Mail server: exim and Dovecot.
PHP and Perl interpreter: the one on the distro.
Database managing: sqlite3.
SSH CLI client.
SSH server.

Absolutly agreed. When I decided (long time ago) to pick Debian as my distro, I compared it with some others big players. Debian was, IMHO, the best hands down. Now, it is the time for Devuan to keep that spirit rolling.