Although I'm very hopeful that Devuan will be my future distro of choice,
we're still not there yet. I thought it might be prudent for me to survey
the other possibilities that do not depend on systemd. So yesterday, I
decided to give FreeBSD (actually, PC-BSD) a trial run.

I'm sorry to say that it was disappointing. In fact, pretty much a failure.
I installed it on both my desktop and laptop. In both cases, the only video
driver I was able to run was VESA. That basically kills it for doing any
kind of multimedia, other than listening to music.

The other big disappointment was with power management. It doesn't seem
that FreeBSD does cpu frequency scaling, though perhaps it does and I just
don't know how to enable it. Anyway, my cpu was running flat out, and on
the laptop this meant the fan ran constantly at top speed. I could have
fried an egg on the keyboard.

So, I'm reluctantly going to scratch FreeBSD from my list.

I do have Slackware installed on both machines. It's multimedia performance
is fine, and power management is a non-issue. However, it's missing many
useful apps which Debian and Ubuntu have. It also lacks one of the drivers
I would need for my current desktop USB wireless adaptor, though possibly
that could be compiled in (or the adaptor replaced).

Thus, my great hope for the future remains Devuan.

cheers,
Robert