Thankyou to everyone who took the time to reply. I apologise that we have been moving house in recent weeks so I did not get to writing back earlier.



I think my purpose in writing was mainly to express my frustration with the rough edges in the Devuan Cinnamon UI and general UX. I definitely can troubleshoot each issue individually and I am grateful for the tips sent by each commenter, many of which I've now tried. In particular I wasn't aware of the significance of the backports repo, I did know of its existence but I thought it would basically be pot luck what is found there and unlikely to be of any significant help. Other more attentive readers noticed that Kicad pages recommend this route for debian users which would imply that Kicad devs are contributing to backports regularly and indeed the version there is very recent. YEAH.



In other areas I haven't fared well, I did try hwclock command but this did not work for me. Strange. I think the best option remaining may be to set it in bios as another commenter suggested. I tried to avoid this for as long as possible as it feels wrong, I never had this issue with another distro. Although I think a large part of my issue is not with devuan as such but my insistence on running cinnamon as my primary UI.



I noticed a lot of other rough edges since then which I will not go into in detail because it looks to me as if trying to solve each issue individually is a lost cause. Rather what I should do is test LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) to see if it does what I want i.e. is it as good as the default LM Ubuntu version. Then I need to migrate that experience over to devuan and report on the list how I did it.



I would be very keen to know if there are any devuan devs reading this and if so what is the technical procedure for forking a package or repo. I have done a bit of debian packaging before although I found it a painful process so I am kinda sorta familiar with stuff like debuild. Ideally if you could point me at any internal documentation describing how devuan packages / releases / repository are constructed then I can go through it and teach myself as required. Then see what's involved in forking LMDE to create an equivalent LM Devuan Edition.



There might be easier workarounds though. As LM team are doing something like devuan is already but forking Ubuntu instead of debian. So if they have a repo consisting of only their packages that then falls back to the official repo that would be most of the job done, but I don't think they have that -- they might have such a thing for internal dev use, I am not sure. I plan to ask LM team a similar question to get links to their procedures but I hesitate in how to phrase it because anyone bringing up systemd issue or init freedom gets flamed badly. Sigh.



Kind regards,

Nick