I have been using Devuan for over a year and I am very satisfied. I fully support the reasons of the Devuan project and I appreciate its desire to preserve the software freedom of his users.
As for most Devuan users, my pc is really personal, that is I am the only user and administrator and, usually, I like to master the software that I install there. Thanks to Devuan Jessie I have been able to create a personal Desktop with XFCE4 without installing consolekit, policykit-1, gvfs and udisks2. I don't use even a display/login manager and pulseaudio. In my opinion, the software listed above is unnecessary and creates more problems than advantages. I run privileged tasks manually or with simple scripts from a root terminal. I'm trying on these days the new release Ascii and I would like to avoid to use a DM (slim/lightdm) and still be able to launch XFCE with startx and without Session management and policykit backends. But unfortunately until now I have not been able to rebuild my personal distribution that I have with Jessie 1.0. In Ascii you can continue not to use a DM, avoid installing elogind and launch X server with startx following the suggestions described in its Release Notes. I tried to start a graphic terminal and Openbox with startx and everything it works wonders. This software still doesn't require elogind and any Session management and policykit backends. Instead, installing the main components of XFCE problems arise. In particular, with xfce4-session they are installed also consolekit and policykit-1, but while in jessie 1.0 it was possible to remove them, in Ascii the command "apt-get purge consolekit", before removing consolekit, automatically installs elogind. and if you try to remove it, consolekit is installed again. Such behavior is incomprehensible. As it is well explained in the Release Notes, "in order to grant processes in the unprivileged user session access to select privileged operations", both, a login manager (either slim or lightdm) and session management system are required. So, why is it forbidden to remove consolekit/elogind after the installation of xfce4-session? if you want to give up "tasks requiring administrator privileges, including suspending/rebooting/shutting down the system, mounting external devices, configuring networking, and so on" its presence is not required! Furthermore, the sole presence of elogind, without the login manager, is insufficient to ensure the operation of the tasks listed above. So why its presence is mandatory? It's also the first time that I can not remove a package as root. Usually root can perform any action and has no limitation. It can happen that he performs a wrong operation: the OS will stop work, but nothing is forbidden to root! So why prevent him from removing elogind after installing xfce4-session? In my opinion, however, the DE functionalities (requiring administrative privilegies) that depend on consolekit/elogind are more related to DM (slim/lightdm) than to the session manager. So consolekit/elogind must be mandatorily installed with the login manager (DM) and not with the session manager. Nothing would change for those who use an DE with all its features, but would allow use of the DE, with some limitations, even with startx, without a DM. What's the opinion of those who have more experience than me? Any suggestions to continue using XFCE4, without a DM any Session management and policykit backends, are welcome. giuseppe
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