Hi crew,

As I promised when joining the list 6 months or so ago, I am making a
gradual transition to Devuan. Lately, my laptop died and I installed
devuan on the new laptop that I purchased. It came with Win11 of course
and initially I was planning to dump the drive and keep it somewhere in
case I ever sold the machine... but my kids pestered me to use the new
computer and I said they could run Win11 for a while until I was ready
to reformat it with devuan... and based on the ensuing experience I'm
convinced that Win11 is even more irretrievably broken than I even I had
ever imagined and I had no compunction about blowing it away permanently
and for good -- I would never return to that nightmare even to sell the
laptop.

So now I'm using devuan as my daily driver and I must say I am having
some difficult problems. Firstly, I like the Cinnamon desktop
environment which I am used to as a former Mint user. But the devuan
Cinnamon version is either old, buggy, or not tuned. It's definitely not
the same experience as running a proper Mint install. Issues that I
encountered so far:

- Cannot set the system date through the GUI. Options to set the date
seem to be missing in the date dialog, not sure why, I will have to do a
comparison with a functioning Mint machine to learn more. As a
workaround I temporarily set the date from the command-line using: sudo
date --set="something" ... but the setting does not persist beyond the
next boot. When it boots with wrong clock the kids cannot use the
computer as it won't connect to any https sites.

- Cannot use hidpi support. If I set the size to anything > 100% it
seems to work initially (although the transition is a bit broken and you
must logout and login again), but after suspend and resume the taskbar
is gone and you have to switch to another console, kill the display
manager (lightdm) and then switch back to the GUI and login again. I
think it is computing the taskbar position wrongly due to the hidpi
setting and placing it offscreen somewhere.

So today I started to do some work with the system and the first thing I
needed to do was install KiCAD. I need at least version 8.0 to continue
working on the projects I was doing on my old laptop. So I needed the
PPA version. But using Ubuntu PPAs is problematic on debian/devuan. As I
don't want to build KiCAD from source (which would be a very lengthy
process involving hundreds of dependencies) what I ended up doing was as
follows:

- Try different Ubuntu base versions until I get something that would
nearly install. I started with Oracular (24.10) but it refused to
install KiCAD with a long list of unmet dependencies, mainly about
package versions not new enough. So I tried Noble (24.04) and it seemed
about the same. But the list got shorter with Mantic (23.10) and the
sweet spot seemed to be Jammy (23.04). If I went back further then the
list started to get longer again.

- Grab the missing dependencies from Ubuntu package archive, it turned
out that I needed the following dpkg's:
libgit2-1.1_1.1.0+dfsg.1-4.1ubuntu0.1_amd64.deb
libmpdec3_2.5.1-2build2_amd64.deb
libpython3.10_3.10.12-1~22.04.7_amd64.deb
libpython3.10-minimal_3.10.12-1~22.04.7_amd64.deb
libpython3.10-stdlib_3.10.12-1~22.04.7_amd64.deb

- With these installed, apt --fix-broken install was willing to set
everything up I could then proceed to install KiCAD. It worked until I
entered one of the editors when it complained it could not get the
wxpython version and said Python plugins will not be available. I don't
think that's a dealbreaker for the time being.

Along the way I also had some problems trying to install the keyring for
the PPA, I've encountered issues before on other distro's due to how
apt-key is supposedly deprecated and none of the incantations that are
meant to replace it seem to do the trick for me. In my case it was
complaining about things like a missing dirmngr, I thought this might be
a devuan issue because it sounds like a server that listens on a socket
and there was no mention of it in /etc/init.d, but a bit more reading
convinced me that it's an internal gpg issue since it's supposed to
launch the daemon by itself (but apparently didn't do so). Eventually I
gave up and used apt-key and that worked but now I get warnings all over
the place. Again, not really a dealbreaker for the time being.

Overall I was feeling quite discouraged today, but I did persevere and
after a lot of time spent, I got most of the way to where I need to go.
So I'm glad I didn't throw in the towel and install Mint again. But I
must say that for me, systemd is a massive problem on a server but it's
only a major annoyance on a desktop machine. It does seem possible that
I might need to return to a systemd-based desktop in the future for the
sake of productivity. But this would be violating a principle, so I'm
going to do everything possible not to go there.

Any thoughts from the list?

kind regards, Nick