I think the difference with Dolphin is that it now emulates an extinct system(s), so it cannot possibly compete with the actual thing. They did have a close call last year, if I remember, and they pretty quickly went into “jettison all illegal shit out of the code base NOW.” -mode.

I had a similar debacle, when I managed to corrupt a btrfs file system to point it wouldn’t mount again…

I was preparing it to have as my main system on bare hardware. I had accidentally mounted the same block device simultaneously in the host and guest: kablamo silent corruption and all 5 hours of progress lost.^* :(

*shred the guest VM, host was ok.

On arch, UEFI boot vars are mounted at /sys/firmware/efi/efivars. It’s unwise to rm -rf them…

Please, never run plain “sudo make install” on a package managed system. With linux from scratch it might make sense… Doing so will “install” the thing (copy the files), but the copied files are foreign to the package manager. You cannot easily undo this, and can cause issues in future.

You had a compiler error about missing header file, libXft is from Xorg project. “devel” versions of packages usually provide these files.

st is from suckless project so it doesn’t need much to be “installed”: copy the built binaries into ~/bin/ or /opt/ and set your user PATH to look into those dirs. Check your user env if you need to modify the PATH.

The shim module smuggles GPL-only kernel symbols into the non-GPL binary blob. Because the actual module using those symbols is not GPL compatible this violates the GPL license.

From Linus Torvalds mouth:

anybody who were to change a xyz_GPL to the non-GPL one in order to use it with a non-GPL module would almost immediately fall under the “willful infringement” thing, and that it would make it MUCH easier to get triple damages and/or injunctions, since they clearly knew about it.

In short, nvidia is playing with “please sue me” button.

For hopping into the GNU/Linux, installing any distro in a Virtual machine or testing liveboot is an good way to to start. The first choice of distro has no meaning. My first was Knoppix on Win98 machine. Tried Ubuntu. Linux Mint got me hooked ~2014, moved to Arch Linux after Antergos. I’m still using Cinnamon DE.

Some “funny” realizations I have made over the years:

• Distros are just vast collections of the same software. The choice is simply what includes your subset.
• Most of the bad rep is missing in-kernel driver for device. Once AMDGPU got usable everything changed for me.
• You can “copy-paste” the entire system into different disk, plug it into another PC and it’s like remote accessing the original.
• It will feel like learning a new language, every time you need to something new. This just fact of life.
• If you want to be “bad person”: find the exact lines of source code and who wrote them. Then curse that person and the program.
• If you want to be mediocre: post an bug report. Maybe it is fixed asap or put onto “wish-list” and forgotten.
• If you want to be an amazing: donate code. Like actually write it. But be warned, the other users are also like vampires, really picky and demands are unreasonable for the time required. If nobody does this then the software turns into stone.
• By popular vote, some things have surpassed their black boxed counter part and there is no equivalent black box to be purchased. It has become free-software-only.

From above, the making of bug report/feature request is an introduction point into an amazing community behind the software you used. It is not an black box of faceless shareholders.

The occasional awareness tests for Linux users:

• When is the new kernel released? I must have the newest kernel.
• Update removed the floor you were standing on.
• The horror of installing anything on windows makes my skin crawl.
• The horror of accidentally pasting “rm -rf” into prompt and knowing it was yourself who pushed the button.
• No back-doors, unless you installed one.