Experimental subject is an Intel Pentium Core2Duo e6300, ASRock P43DE
mainboard, 4GB RAM, MSI (nVIDIA) NX6200TC-128G video, wired gig-E network,
SATA HDD, everything in / except separate swap - a pretty plain toybox. It
had served as my primary machine, then was regularly used to demo Linux at
community events, and now helps in the home network. Pretty sure I used the
amd64 arch on this box from the start, except for live DVDs being demoed.

I had long ago upgraded from Wheezy to Devuan Jessie, avoiding Debian
Jezzie[1], and had changed the repositories to pkgmaster.devuan.org soon
after that was announced as working. I simply copied/edited the
sources.list(.d) entries for jessie to ascii (leaving both active), pinned
packages to stable as best I could[2], and satisfied myself I was fetching
the necessary package lists. Then I unpinned, ran apt-get dist-upgrade, and
looked the list over before committing. Only one minor item stood out, so I
said to go ahead and upgrade.

Ooooo-kay. A lot of maintainer change notices here. Fortunately most of them
don't seem to apply to my use of this box. Still, it's the most change I've
seen in the De??an universe in a long time. Perhaps because I followed
'testing' before and didn't generally see the changes all at once, but a bit
of a shock none the less. Funny/sad to see notices reverting changes just
put in.

On reboot everything seemed to work as expected, except it was faster! I
didn't expect that. Remote login was faster, apt-get update was faster,
aptitude was... missing. OK, I expected that; dist-upgrade had told me it
was going to be deleted even though aptitude-common was being upgraded.[3] A
quick (literally) apt-get install aptitude returned the interface I've known
since Woody, and I was back to doing everything I did before. Just faster.

While there was some mention of XFCE updates in the dist-upgrade report,
LXDE was still active from what I could see. Solitaire played, Firefox
fired; all in all, a good upgrade experience. --Don


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jezebel
[2] Non-critical system does not mean disposable.
[3] Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards...