Haha both of course. Young me was intrigued by this great puzzle of getting the system back up. Much quicker than a reinstall, too! At the same time it was one of the Gentoo moments that made me switch to Arch and Manjaro later. I certainly learned a lot with Gentoo but it was also a fragile timesink.

I remember I struggled with broken dynamic linking from bringing in binaries from the outside. I needed an entire build-chain from the same build and then build my way up with source packages (you have them around in gentoo) in my system until i reached portage. And then used emerge to recompile the buildchain twice so it was compatible with my system again.

I sure hope there are ways to unpack RPMs by hand and copy the contents where they need to be. Would be very unlinuxy to make it a binary format and not a zipped container of some sort. But you might struggle depending on the amount of dependencies.

I found out there were binary packages that were build together and manually downloaded and unpacked every package I needed for a minimum coherent build chain (no kernel but gcc, gnuutils etc) and used that to get emerge working again to build a new build chain with my own settings and used that to rebuild system to get rid of the foreign packages and be back. The gentoo wiki helped a lot.

I once accidentally deleted python from my gentoo system (needed for emerge) and rescued it.

Yeah, it is not impossible, but you are actively going against the maintainers choice of software and configuration, that they can assume you have during every update. That is what makes Arch so popular: no handholding that would get in your way; but also no helping hand from upstream, only documentation how to do it. Cinnamon is maintained by the Mint team and considered difficult to install anywhere else. IMHO when you are used to KDE, it can feel lacking.

Mint has no KDE install which makes it a hazzle to setup and fragile to upgrade. You also wouldn’t gain anything, because they are both ubuntu based systems. Not worth it imo, like a sidegrade.

You can transplant your desktop onto anything, the configuration is stored in .config and .local in your home folder. Bring those to another distribution with the same software (copy while you are not logged in, ie while in live cd or reuse the home partition without formatting) and it will look the same.

Because windows is really bad for work, I would want my kde multidesktop multiscreen setup while I earn money spending time in visual studio.

I did it once because I had an unstable cable connection, it was surprisingly easy***(for me) https://www.baeldung.com/linux/merge-several-internet-connections

Adapt and fight. Linux is the dominant OS for everything, so Windows started to support it (wsl) so they don’t loose developers. Secure boot worked as a moat for a while and the MS monopoly on OS keys is still an obstacle. Linux works better on ARM than Windows, so obviously Qualcom Laptops have a locked down bootloader. They will continue to lock themselfes into the future with money and development resources.

This is woolsome.

As long as your installation stick is a live image and you keep it around, it also serves as a mighty tool to fix things with google and chroot.

Ccache is also good to compile and set up as one of the first.

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members They are hiding here.

It’s not unlimited on PC’s. Most mainstream mainboards don’t get firmware updates after 2 years. Weakest link in the security chain sets the time.

Everyone should think about threats to their data. Cloud backup and laptops better be encrypted, services with open ports be shielded. Linux viruses do exist, especially for android and routers. But also whatever system has an outdated dokuwiki open in the wild is a welcome addition to a botnet. The value of a botnet is in number of infected systems and you don’t need root access to mine monero or take part in a ddos on a machine. Linux security is sincerely undervalued. Selinux, the grsec kernel patches, chrootjail, tripwire… do exist, but are a hassle to setup and maintain. The new container options are nice (docker or flatpack) having your webbrowser contained is not a bad idea.

Update your router, your desktop is spoiled for updates. I stop my 1 am ramblings here.

• Metal blob solid
• Warzone 2100
• Widelands

Only public facing ports, maybe your openvpn login. But that means you are already firewalled up and your attack surface is tiny, good 👍

I recommend fail2ban to stop the automated attacks that are the background noise of the internet. It will set your firewall to block certain ip’s for a while, especially ports 21/22 are getting hammered with dictionary login attempts. And port 80 and 8080 for example get constantly version checked to see if you are vulnerable with an old apache, old dokuwiki etc, so don’t expose more than you need to and maybe learn about ssh tunnels and close a few.

I once installed ossim in a small network with a server and it showed me it is war out there, scripts flying everywhere.

Marginal support happens a lot on Linux. See AMD drivers without Adrenaline. “You may use Linux if you must… at your own risk… we do the bare minimum to keep you runnig… our past stuff is in the open but we can pull the rug on future releases any time.” You can install gog games and maybe some dude made galaxy work in wine, corporate has decided that is good enough.