Over the last several weeks I've had to rebuild my daily driver and my
main vm host server. I've learned a couple of things along the way.
Google Gemini has turned out to be useful in helping to track down
issues. You have to explicitly tell it you're working with Devuan.
Otherwise, it assumes systemd.

I rebuilt my daily driver (Beelink SER5, Ryzen 7 8 core, 16 thread,
built in Radeon GPU)  from formatting the disk and importing profile
information where I needed to. I had good backups. The new system
actually fixed a problem where my sound preferences would reset every
time the system put the monitor to sleep. It was annoying, but not the
end of the world.

I run the MATE desktop and have been for years. I like it, it's
lightweight and the file manager, Caja, has some nice features. I
digress. I tried to run compiz and the desktop cube on it. Shoot me, I
like some of the visual goodies. I don't recommend doing that. While
compiz is nice, it's fragile. It kept corrupting my user profile forcing
me to reinstall several time before I gave up on it and started using
picom. It's not as nice, but it works and it seems solid. I use the
BTRFS file system. Time machine will happily fill up the drive.

My main host that hosts my virtual machines is a box that I build, but
has a Supermicro H12SSL-I motherboard with an AMD Epyc 7282 16 core 32
thread and 128GB of RAM. It has an NVME drive a couple of SSD's, a 2TB
Western Digital Black spinning rust (Thank you Steve Litt. I love that
term.) and an 8TB Seagate enterprise drive. I reconfigured this machine
to boot UEFI so that it could take advantage of the NVME disk. I got
that working and booting onto Excalibur, got libvirtd installed and a
host of other things needed to run it. It is snappy as it should be. I
disabled apparmor in install, but the installation doesn't listen to
that and merrily installs & enables apparmor anyway.

I've discovered the age of a hdd makes a difference. I have some old WD
Black 2TB drives that have been very reliable. I push snapshots of my
virtual machines to them. Writes to them are faster than to the HP SATA
SSD. Writes to the 8TB drive are even faster.  Something seems
constrained in i/o.  I've done quite a bit of tuning and setting options
in fstab, nothing really helps. I think it's hardware related. I may
pick up a NVME drive card so that I can add some fast staging to speed
up the kvm snapshot process.

I also replaced my office workstation with a Beelink SER5. I pull the
500GB NVME Windows drive and install a 1TB NVME drive. The process is
usually smooth except in this latest version of the hardware. This
latest version of the hardware has a Realtek 2.5Gbps network adapter. 
The 6.12.n kernel doesn't recognize it. I ended up installing via wifi
(not my favorite way to do things), but I got it installed.  I added the
Devuan Excalibur-backports to it and installed the 7.0.9 kernel and now
the card works fine. I think disabled the wifi adapter (not needed and
I'm in a shared office and the wifi is on a different network.) I also
disabled network manager and hard coded the ip.  Everything works fine.
Now I need to visit each of my vm's and hosts to disable apparmor on
each of them.

My main webhost (VM) is running Daedalus with ispconfig. It boots in
about 15 seconds (due to the fact that it is running an instance of
Tomcat) I also have a DNS resolver that runs powerdns resolver (very
fast). that vm boots in less than 5 seconds now that it's on a NVME drive.

Anyway, I just wanted to let you all know my experiences with installing
Devuan Excalibur.

Cheers,
Curtis