Still a little weird on Devuan, and I suspect there are two reasons:

• The first is the display, kind of wonky. But I installed a fully XLibre version of it which may explain that. Xorg and XLibre don’t quite agree, but Xorg is no longer developed and I refuse to go to Wayland until it’s ready. Wayland messes up everything it touches, far worse that XLibre working out a bug or two. Typing an email in Devuan’s version of Evolution became a pain in the rump because letters just run off the page and I had to use Format –> Wrap Lines maneuver on every single line. I suppose I could use an external editor, but gee whiz, why bother with Evolution or Geary at all if I have to do that? Pft.

• The second, easily fixed, were the Refracta tools. Not as point-and-click simple as MX-Snapshot and MX-Live-USB Maker, but I was able to make a perfect, bootable copy of my existing Devuan system, then write it to a USB stick using “mintstick” and with persistence! Any changes I make running “Live” are preserved, which is nice! But then how am I supposed to install it to another HDD? No installer is present. RAWR! But, I was simply able to add the Refracta-installer to the LiveUSB and bingo, problem solved.

Again, it feels like I have to do things “the long way around” in Devuan compared to most other “one-size-fits-most” Linux OSes. But I do not fault Devuan for any of that. Devuan has to repackage everything from Debian, removing stupid bits of code that make a piece of software dependent on systemd. Almost everything in Gnome, for example, is increasingly systemd-dependent. Of course, it’s Gnome: Woke and part of the “new Linux” ecosystem that tries to make everyone use Wayland, systemd, pulseaudio, and everything else Red Hat / IBM and Big Tech wants. The “old” Linux is better, because it always worked, reliably and without stupid high demands on CPU and RAM. This crud all started when someone decided they should fix what wasn’t broken to begin with; then force “adoption” of their “solution;” and then kill off the old, unbroken, rock-stable and reliable predecessor that didn’t need any “fixing.”

Conformity is what they’re after. And that is exactly why projects like Devuan, OpenMandriva, antiX, Artix, and a host of others are emerging to preserve the “Old Ways,” if you will; the UNIX idea of “do one thing and do it well” and preserve the freedom of users to control their own equipment and software as they please. God bless the Old Ways.