Hello,

I've been running Devuan since ASCII.  I love the distribution so far
and I really like that systemd is not involved.  Install docker and
parts of systemd infrastructure will show up, though, like cgroups.

I upgraded this machine to Beowulf and I have spent a couple of weeks
trying to upgrade it to Chimaera.  For the most part the upgrade went
smoothly on the 3rd try.  Thankfully, this is on a virtual machine so I
was able to work no a copy in a test environment.  The first test
environment (an old 6 core AMD) was pressed into service.  The upgrade
failed on this host because it is so old (AMD Phenom II 6 core) that it
did not have ssse3 support. libhypersan (needed for regular expressions)
won't install without it.  That broke the entire installation. So that
was no good and I had to change hosts.  That covers the first 2 tries. 
I host websites on this system.  It needs to work.

fail2ban didn't like the upgrade process at all and hung.  I had to kill
fail2ban and the dist-upgrade went on, but gave an dpkg error at the end.

postgrey also hung.  I killed that and got a dkpg error at the end on
that one, too.

PHP is 2 versions behind.  Seriously?  The current version 8.1.n. PHP
7.4 goes end of life in november and Devuan has no PHP upgrade path as
the Sury.org packages will install except for php-fpm which has a
systemd dependency. I need php-fpm as most modern webservers use this
instead of apache directly.  Plesk and ISPConfig both work this way. 
I'm running ISPConfig.

daemons that were stopped and disabled got re-enabled and started, cups,
cups-browsed, avahi-daemon, saned.  None of these are needed on a LAMP
installation.  I had disabled them a long time ago.  It seems to me,
that the install script should be checking so see whether a service is
set to be running in the default runlevels.  I had run update-rc.d -f
service remove on all of those.  I found them all running and had to
stop and disable them all again.

Apparmor, which, when I first installed this machine, was stopped and
removed before I had gone and installed anything on it. Apparmor got
installed, though I had uninstalled it when I set this server up. I had
to stop it, run aa-teardown and run update-rc.d -f remove apparmor.  I
though I had purged that a long time ago.

Thought this was worth noting.

Cheers,
Curtis