Hello:
Well ...
Yes, you have a point there.

This does really get old after a while and at 62 I just don't have the enthusiasm that I had when I took up all of this from DOS5.5 through to XPSP3.

I did have what seemed to be a great thing going with CrunchBang but that endevour went south, so I ended up with Mint, which for a while was OK.

Till I started to look under the hood.

Well ...
I'll keep trying till I find something else (a more developed Devuan?) which does not need to be tamed.
And in the meanwhile I may just learn something new.

I spent a lot of time working with #! only to have it go south, I don't want that to happen again.

In any case, if not starting up a service I don't (and most people don't) need wreaks havoc in a DE or if simply changing the DE (Cinnamon for MATE) screws up the install, there's really something wrong with that distro.

And much appreciated it is. =-)

Thanks for your input.

A.

have you tried bunsenlabs?

Hello:
No, but I may try it out if I do not find a non-systemd dependant distribution.

Thanks for the suggestion.

I agree with you WRT the 'starting out basic and building up' concept but at this stage I need a distribution that will work reasonably well (to my expectations) 'out of the box' so to speak.

I'm not a developer/programmer but I'm not the average end-user (whatever that is these days) so my idea is that it has to be reasonably familiar (to me), have what I need and at the same time be easy to work with.

ie: I don't get to find an unneeded application running by default in my setup, application which I cannot get a hold of and control and then have to spend hours on end just to find out that getting rid of it will screw up the installation.

Then there's this systemd issue that brings back memories of my difficult transition from W3.11 to W95, with the end of the familiar *.ini files I understood (and could tweak when things went foul) to the dark and undocumented workings of *the registry*, which took me a few years to get a minimal hold of.

So I have given notice to Mint 18/Cinnamon.
I have now installed PCLinkOS (MATE) on one of my disks and am studying it to see how it behaves.

It has been smooth up to now and if things go as expected, I'll be able to migrate all my stuff in a fortnight or so and be done with it.

It uses RPM packages but I expect I'll have most of what I have with .deb packages today.

And if it gives me any grief, I'll just look for and switch to something else.

Best regards,

A.

bunsenlabs works reasonably well but is still minimal enough to satisfy your needs.
a problem like the one in this thread would have gone very differently. anyhow, assistive technologies aren't even installed.

being based on debian stable, bunsenlabs uses systemd.
it has a learning curve, if you're used to sysvinit scripts or similar, but a good one.

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