Got it in one

And by the way. In the upgrade process all my other applications were updated too and I now have shiny new front ends for them.

Enjoy your computing.

CruxoM, first off my decision to adopt a distribution that does not use systemd is purely personal and I am not advocating for or against anyone's choices. There have been flame wars about this kind of stuff and I really don't want to get into arguments about it.

I chose to go without systemd because I think that systemd obscures the initialisation processes. Without systemd initialisation files are in plain text and may be edited by users/admins. With systemd the initialisation processes is not in plain sight but is undertaken by an overseeing daemon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd

I lived with it for years and it made no difference on the surface to my day to day use of Linux Mint.

Since moving to Devuan and no systemd I have found I need to do a little more system administration. That was no surprise, as I said in my post, I wanted more control - and that means more work. But it's not an arduous amount of work, once a month or so I back up all my data then check the system for upgrades. Yesterday while trying to install Krita I got a message from my system saying the depositories I wanted were no longer there. It occurred to me that my version of Devuan (ASCII) was older and maybe I needed to upgrade to Beowulf. It took me a while following instructions I found on the Devuan web site but I got there.

Under Mint I think I would have had to leave it all to the automatic processes governed by systemd - I may be completely wrong about that but....

After upgrading the whole installation and logging into a new look version of Devuan I feel empowered: I did it! That gives me great satisfaction.

Right now in our present circumstances having control is doubly important to me.

In the long term free software is important, if it's free as described by the Free Software Foundation: https://www.fsf.org/ "Free software means that the users have the freedom to run, edit, contribute to, and share the software. Thus, free software is a matter of liberty, not price."

There you have it.

To anyone else reading this: I don't want to get into a long technical conversation about the advantages of systemd - I am not really qualified for that. I made my choice, you make yours.

Thanks, Brian. I've done that and it's worked. I'll be posting the next episode in the saga shortly.

Stuart