20251203-devuan.txt

I recently tried installing BSD on my craptop. Surprise, surprise, it
wasn't compatible with my hardware. This is the 2nd time I gave an
earnest effort in installing it. It was probably stupid considering my
hardware hasn't changed since 2019, although BSD has had at least one
update since then.

So I decided, what the hell: I'll install Devuan. I had heard about it
I believe from the gopher mailing list. Someone's April Fool's joke
was to put Gopher memes on it or something several years ago. Anyway,
I like the idea of a minimalist distro and I like Debian, so it seemed
like a good match.

I booted up a live USB and installed it. I decided to try encrypting
partitions. As usual with my dumbass setups, the home partition didn't
take my password. I blame this on using Dvorak and possibly/probably
the distro installer (yad or something) was using QWERTY? I don't
know, but it's quite annoying when there's no way to see what you're
typing in plaintext (that I could see): you only confirm what you
typed. I switch often enough between QWERTY and Dvorak. I'm guessing
my password was replaced with gibberish and I did NOT want to try to
decode QWERTY->Dvorak->QWERTY or the inverse every time I needed to
log in.

Anyway, I went ahead and reinstalled Devuan and encrypted the whole
disk and thankfully it didn't mess up my password (i decided to keep
it all in QWERTY for the install process). So far it works, but I have
done zero ricing. The previous installation was maybe Debian Bullseye?
I can't actually recall because I didn't run X on my craptop and all
TTYs look alike. I don't actually rice my GUI that much: just install
a custom build of DWM. Depending on my mood, I'll not install or
uninstall the DE that comes with it. But with Devuan, it seemed
easiest to keep Xfce especially considering the guided installer ran
in a GUI. Again, I've done almost no ricing and my configuration files
are all kept in a central server that I self-host.

I really don't understand why people put their personal configs on
public Github. I highly doubt anyone else is going to use your setup
and I'm pretty sure it would break theirs anyway. I made the mistake
of trying to download an Xfce+dwm config and my entire fucking DE was
destroyed to the point of ugly near-uselessness. Xfce still kind of
worked, but after needing to go into Xfce to edit some settings a few
times, I just gave up and wiped the drive for a new OS installation.
I'll never install others' configs again.