I switched my old desktop to Devuan and with little trouble I got it working just fine. Making a backup with an rsync back end put my home data back. (Although I had to give myself root privileges, then chrown my claws mail directory back to my username and make it 777 to make claws work again.)

I thought I saw some anomalies so I thought I could register with some Devuan list-servs and discuss, but to no avail at the following:

1) https://talk.devuan.org/ , it said it would send a confirm email, but never got it. Tried a resend of the confirmation a week later, never got it. Checked my spam folders (verizon's webmail, not there either).

2. Tried devuan-announce at mailinglists.dyne.org, filled out the information, but the captcha did not appear. Clicked the subscribe button anyway but received no response. (I expected another confirm email, nothing.)

3. Tried the DNG at the same place, same result (no captcha either.

Lastly I tried subscribing here with success, (got the confirm email AND I could see the captchas) so here I be. However this list-serv is generic.

So my question is, where are the Devuans?

Wait, I see a few more link at the bottom of the main Devuan site: "all contact options". I composed this thread so far I guess I'll run with it.

If I get through I'll mark this "solved". Sorry for bloviating.

Devuan is dormant !

What??? After all that hooha?

Can you substantiate that, or is this "announcement" yet more drama and hooha?

My vote is hooha and drama.

1 members found this post helpful.

After all that, thanks.

There was no response from the dev1galaxy forum either.

My last shot is to send an email of last resort to the address at the bottom of their web page.

After all that work and no community, I may as well try another distro.

What were you hoping to find with Devuan specifically?

Nothing in particular, just a distro that didn't mess with me. I was on PCLinuxOS and it started getting wierd. Wouldn't run sudo needful things even after giving root password that it asked for. Then the desktop wouldn't behave with window sizes and fonts. This was after migrating from 32 bit to 64. Had to actually log in as root to do updates. My choice of Devuan was an educated guess. I had been playing with a laptop where I have a couple dozen distros on Grub. Devuan didn't seem flashy, did what I wanted, and did not give me a hard time. (Basic desktop stuff.)

The anomalies I wanted to mention to their community were little things.

1) Synaptic. The little descriptions for each piece of software that you normally see on other distros were only one liners, not the usual paragraphs of description. Basically just the title. Why is that? Is it a bad version of Synaptic or is the Distro? Basically it means you have to know what something is based on the name.

2) Bleachbit. Once you turned on overwrite blank space, it wouldn't go away on later runs. It would still do it after you unchecked the configuration. Annoying if you also checked to run after boot up. Had to uninstall it. (Don't know if that is Devuan specific or does it happen to everyone.)

Guess I'll run another rsync and try again.

there's no announcement that i can find, which leads me to believe that devuan being "discontinued" and/or "dormant" is one disgruntled fanboi's personal opinion.
browsing un/official devuan channels, i must say it's awfully quiet.
but i wish them good luck and hope they get more constant users as time goes by.

while i have no personal experience with pclinuxos, i must say people's general opinion is positive.
what you describe sounds like something is wrong, and it probably has nothing to do with the distro.
my first guess - no offence - would be a PEBKAC.
you esp. do NOT have to login as root to do updates. 'su' or 'sudo' should suffice in 99.9% of all cases.

on to devuan:
it seems you are comparing the (ubuntu, mint) software center to synaptic. these are 2 different applications, again nothing distro specific.
while i'm not sure you could use one of the software centers on devuan, you can definitely use synaptic on any apt-based distro.
fwiw, it's possible to see a description for each package, and it's possible to make this description easily visible through GUI preferences.

i can't say much about bleachbit except this:
- the very nature of the program is potentially destructive, and i'm sure it has shown you a disclaimer to that effect.
- it is mostly ex-windows users that feel the need to use something like this. on a linux system, you don't really need it.


With all that said, there are plenty of distros to choose from:
http://distrowatch.com/
i recommend staying with the major players and not try to hop from one distro to another as soon as something doesn't work (as expected), but instead try to solve problems.

Use L M D ed.

https://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php

period !

next ! !

If it was me i would ask in the IRC channel of devuan (irc.freenode.net ; #devuan).
You could also ask in the refracta forum, it seems there is a slight relation, some devuan folks hang around there (refracta.freeforums.org).

http://www.ibiblio.org/refracta/

since


Forum

http://refracta.freeforums.org/

Resources

http://www.ibiblio.org/refracta/resources.html

Anything else you need to find is in the side bar at ibiblio.

I like using the sourceforge download link myself

https://sourceforge.net/projects/refracta/

Because sourceforge is usually good about supplying md5sum downloads to check my iso downloaded file against for file integrity.

Good luck with it.

Why not just Debian? i've nothing against Mint but unless you specifically want things like the DE setups and non-free stuff installed you might as well just use Debian.
Unless, of course, Devuan as chosen because of the systemd issue in which case Mint's no better.

Found these though it has nothing to do with missing Duvians. Though my links do bring up Duvian wandering in the wild.

http://kalos.mine.nu/

https://sourceforge.net/projects/miyolinux/

I'll just keep plodding along with AntiX myself.