No idea about a DM that doesn't suck eggs and swallow yolks, and couldn't care less about Wayland "usability". I just do everything from TTY, using this very antiquated command:

startx

Along with Orphaner, I think it got deprecated by Debian indefinitely, as nothing exists past Bookworm sans Sid for RISC-V. You could try to install it from Daedalus.

I just use Debfoster now.

Try enabling non-free-firmware if you haven't yet (shown example line below):

deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged/ excalibur main contrib non-free non-free-firmware

Update your repositorites, and then install the particular firmware package(s) you need. Things like firmware-iwlwifi (Intel), firmware-brcm80211 (Broadcom/Cypress 802.11), firmware-realtek (Realtek), and so on. Follow the same steps that worked for you in Debian, as they should be the same in Devuan. This respin appears to be using NetworkManager, so these firmware packages should work just fine if the hardware matches. It just depends on what your system's wireless card is for it to work. For example, I recently bought 802.11 USB wireless card adapters for my laptops that struggle to connect without one (the aforementioned firmware-brcm80211 didn't support it), and had to rely on building a driver from this repository, since none of the firmware packages I installed were working.

Why not just stick with IRC, XMPP, Mumble, Jitsi Meet, and a ton of other decentralized, privacy-respecting (as much as possible) FLOSS communication protocols?

You can definitely remove or disable Elogind itself. You might have a harder time using a computer without the libraries most "conventional" packages are built against. ConsoleKit2 and Seatd can both help out more, plus the dummy Logind package (dummy-logind) that Devuan has made available since Daedalus. Since I need incremental RSYNC backups from Timeshift and Back in Time, Polkitd must be kept. Still, it's nice to have KDE and Network Manager functioning without any issues without an existing Elogind process (again, only the libraries are kept to avoid breaking the entire system).

Eudev is still a problem. I also personally removed Udisks2 and now use Udevil for automatic USB mounting as a non-root user (you can optionally use SpaceFM as an extra safety cushion).

As of Trixie, Debian has made it harder to remove or replace ALL parts of Systemd, never mind D-Bus (which is completely impossible to rip out and still have a functional computer). Devuan simply follows Debian's steps and applies its own blacklists regarding packages that have a hard dependency on Systemd. Elogind is used in place.

The only other Debian-based distro that has gone the great lengths to remove or lessen the impacts of Systemd or Elogind would be antiX.

Mmm... Not quite.

chmod a+x /path/to/file.appimage

They will work then.

Greenjeans already clarified he didn't hardcode any of that "inaccessibility" crap, and he did say he'll look into it, simply because he wants to help. It mainly comes down to which theme you use, as Rations mentioned. Wanting to cater to the visually impaired is nice and all, but it's not "mandatory", and hardly at all the end of the world because the current theme in use made it harder for you to tell things apart. That MATE screenshot was way more evident of visual issues.

The "historical relationship" is a moot point when you're just nitpicking over a theme's color and contrast defaults. That's why you can change it. Not a big deal.

There is no one-size-fits-all theme, ever. People are still gonna complain.

@Daemonratte:

Consider using Devuan's official Git repository. That way, you ensure Micro$lop doesn't remove you for whatever reason, and your hard work isn't lost.

Are you running startxfce4 --with-ck-launch directly or from its contents in your ~/.xinitrc file? I use Xfce, and for the latter, that always works for me. Does it sound like an issue with Seatd permissions? There's also seatd-launch you could prepend to startx or startxfce4 --with-ck-launch. Also, for ConsoleKit2, I have the packages libck-connector0, libconsolekit1, and libpolkit-gobject-consolekit-1-0 installed alongside of it. I do not have libpam-ck-connector installed.

I have no problems shutting down or rebooting with these YAD scripts:

For ~/bin/xfce4-logout:

#!/bin/bash

yad --window-icon=system-log-out --image="system-log-out" \
  --title "Log Out" \
  --text "What would you like to do?" \
  --button="_Lock:0" \
  --button="Log _Out:1" \
  --button="S_uspend:2" \
  --button="_Reboot:3" \
  --button="_Shut Down:4" \

ret=$?

[[ $ret -eq 4 ]] && gksu poweroff
[[ $ret -eq 3 ]] && gksu reboot
[[ $ret -eq 2 ]] && xflock4 && gksu pm-suspend
[[ $ret -eq 1 ]] && killall Xorg
[[ $ret -eq 0 ]] && xflock4

For the fake /usr/local/bin/gksu:

#!/bin/sh
set -e

if [ $(id -un) = root ] ; then
    exec "$@"
fi

if [ "$SUDO_ASKPASS" = "$0" ] ; then
    exec yad --entry --title="PASSWORD" --entry-label="$*" --hide-text
fi

exec env SUDO_ASKPASS="$0" sudo -A "$@"

As far as drive mounting goes, no issues with Udevil's Devmon running in the background. I removed Udisks2 entirely.