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0XFAB

Member

From: Brazil

Registered: 2025-08-01

Posts: 2  

First 15 days with Devuan and Excalibur...

Well folks, first 15 days with Devuan Excalibur. I'm a long time KDE user, since Mandrake 6 (first version to be distributed on newsstand magazines in Brazil) then all the way till Mandriva death and then Kubuntu. I don't intend to make comparisons, but some points are worth to mention. I use a T430 Thinkpad as a daily driver dual boot with W10, so no new hardware here. I started with Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial and went all the way till 25.10. I don't like a lot of things of Ubuntu, and the way they impose things has annoyed me a lot through the years. UPstart, MIR, Wayland, Unit, PPA, SNAP and more recently Rust. As things are becoming more bad and biased each year, I had to give an enough is enough. A couple of months ago Lunduke made some videos of Distros and Devuan and OpenMandriva were exactly what I was looking for. I was very tempted to go back to Mandriva, but Mandriva gave me a sort of trauma with small RPM community distros. I had a hard time trying to move to Mageia back then in a previous notebook which came with Mandriva from factory. One thing that I started to look at from that moment was a company-backed distro. So, I decided to migrated to Ubuntu, one thing I had to admit, the dependencies and installation hell almost were gone after that. That was before GPT and DNF, and 99% of internet help was:"sudo apt something", so I got used to the rhythm.

My /home partition is separated, and it was just format everything else. Devuan installation didn't work wirelessly on first trial. I had to download the drivers on a separate pen drive and load them (iwlwifi). Gpt helped (and is helping) a lot with everything, It said is a known Debian issue ( as some others later), But I managed to install fine with KDE (no other DE at that moment). I had my previous list of installed software and I went through it, installing everything which was not installed before. No biiiig issue. Discover app isn't working fine by itself, I have to add flatplak to make it install things, but at the end it worked. The sound is not working directy. Gpt a workaround to pipewire which I run as a script after login. I'll open a bug report for that. As KDE discover and some other issues like kscreen locking GUI were happening, I decided to open a Bug request to KDE, just to find out they close it next day. I'm supposed to have the latest KDE to report a bug, which is 6.5, and Trixie/Excalibur came with it. 6.3. They said they “move fast” but c'mom that's ridiculous. I have just installed a brand-new system. As KDE is also scheduling a Wayland only in a near future(2027?), I think about start to get used to other DE, so I installed cinnamon, didn't like too much, and then went to XFCE4. So I thought about switching XFCE/KDE from time to time. I also installed XLibre, and I'm running KDE/XFCE with it. No problems with it yet. Please keep supporting these guys. I thought it would be easy, but it's not working as expected, when I switch from DEs, Brave looses it sessions authorizations. So I had to keep logging to Google, X and everything again. Gpt helped to find that XFCE uses gnome Keyring opposed to KDE that uses Kwallet. Tried to make XFCE use KWallet but without success. Tried to make KDE use gnome keyring without success. Still working on those. Very time-consuming, so I'm going whenever I can. Proton VPN extension was also an issue. Didn't work. GPT culprit MESA, suggest force downgrade, I did, broke KDE, installed again. Proton VPN was still not running, and I gave up and installed another VPN extension. I also use a software called Jjazzlab for music backing track, which is having issues, it uses FluidSynth midi, that is not working as expected, I'm still checking on that.

GPT many times gave me systemd related tips (systemctl , journalctl, updatedb…) and I have to keep remembering it, I'm using Devuan. No systemd! So it changes the output. Not 100% trustable. I notice the system start / shutdown is a bit faster, but sometimes the "this is a know bug from Debian" annoys me somehow. As I said before I have some disagreements with what Ubuntu is doing, and I don't know if just a perception but seems that a lot of things got more tied to systemd; and it's like this is the only way of doing things, and people just follows. Ubuntu has the merit to put their system running fine, "round", as we say here. I really didn't have too much trouble with LTS systems. But it's a lock-in, as years pass by, this lock-in goes more deep, and it's like some developers are opting to embrace because "it's the way things are". I know I'll get to a point where I'll be comfort with Devuan and the way things work here. But I wasn't expecting to have such work, maybe a brand-new release, maybe it's just an adaptation, but I feel like, you know, what the hell is happening with these Linux companies? It’s all for power and money? Where are we heading to ?  Thanks and sorry for the long text.

KindlyDoRight

Member

Registered: Yesterday

Posts: 13  

Re: First 15 days with Devuan and Excalibur...

0XFAB, thank you for your in-depth write up and experience.  I'm endeavoring to successfully and methodically migrate my workstations, VMs, laptops, servers, and production environment (web-facing) to Devuan.  (And eventually my Linux music studio, which also uses Jjazzlab for music backing tracks and Reaper.)

    I, too, have had my "enough is enough" moment, with IBM's SystemD invasion and the "Colossal Tech" takeover of Linux.
                        (my first Linux was Yggdrasil Linux)

My single-most important system, with multi-generational importance (one that will be inherited and stewarded), is now safely on Devuan.

Note: I found that web searches using "Alpine" as a keyword helped me with certain system aspects of Devuan.

Last edited by KindlyDoRight (Today 16:55:54)

KindlyDoRight

Member

Registered: Yesterday

Posts: 13  

Re: First 15 days with Devuan and Excalibur...

[0XFAB, if you will kindly permit me...
For others, I'm addressing one of the pain/friction points you mentioned.]

KDE Plasma Discover, packages fix

The solution (provided by rbit) is "shown running" here:
    https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?pid=65844#p65844

And rbit's perfectly working shell script is here:
    https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?pid=63245#p63245

(I've tested that it works perfectly with Devuan 6 excalibur,
    and it is coded to also work with Devuan 7 freia,
    and Devuan 5 and 4, daedalus and chimaera).

EDX-0

Member

From: Guatemala

Registered: 2020-12-12

Posts: 265  

Re: First 15 days with Devuan and Excalibur...

ah systemd and it's consequences... it gets annoying having to work around some of the systemd "innovations" and the upstream decisions to exclusively rely on them as the one and only interface, glad to read you are enjoying the devuan experience in spite of that

in regard to the many annoyances do not limit yourself to suffering alone with chatgpt, chances are someone else in the devuan forum has also suffered them and came up with some solution.

in regards to sound and pipewire there are many camps and proposed solutions, from simply configuring it as a user service in runit and openrc (tho i think that option is only available in testing and unstable at the time), to more terse solutions like using slackware's "daemon" program or even using shed the generic session process and user services provider, there are always the alsa purists that say that anything on top of alsa be it jack, pulseaudio or pipewire is a disease and symptom of the lack of understanding of alsa and the horrible documentation turning things into an absurdist comedy... so it all boils down to picking your camp and choosing a poison to drink

on a tangent check out https://github.com/eylles/devuan-scripts tho a portion of the scripts target window manager setups rather than full fledged desktop environments something or other in there may come out at the very least useful.