I recommend bookmarking the SLUM (Shadow Library Uptime Monitor) site. It’s extremely helpful if you access resources like this often.

One of my favorite tshirts from the era had the Alternative Tenacles logo (the bat thing lower right) and said: “Home Taping is Killing Record Industry Profits… Killing Ain’t Wrong”

AI centipede

I think of it like my dad’s generation being able to work on their cars right down to rebuilding the engine, whether out of necessity or purely for the fun of it. Their wives’ attitudes toward those pastimes were pretty similar too.

If you want “as barebones as possible” then wouldn’t you better off with stock Void? It’s nice and barebones straight out of the box.

Docker containers can eat a lot of space over time. When’s the last time you did a docker system prune? Be sure to read up on what it does before you try it.

Yep, I tried going the dumbphone route and lasted about a month. I travel a fair bit for work, and it’s almost impossible now without a smartphone.

There’s calcurse. It’s in the arch repos.

I’m pretty sure every kid in kindergarten knows an easier way to draw a hand.

Holy shit, how did I make it this far in life without knowing about this add-on?

Believe me I’ve tried.

My kid’s always asking my ex, “Mom, why don’t you just get Jellyfin? It has, like, everything.”

Lol, a lot, but not that many. Mostly docker shit filling up /var from containers I’d tried running or run for a while and got bored of. Just needed a good docker prune -a --volumes.

Thanks, but I’m an idiot. I dug around a little and realized I was low on disk space and running a badly outdated version. All good now.

Do some searches on “kiosk” software. That’s the general term of art for machines that are intended to run a single program/interface. As for distros, you’ll want something light and easy to maintain, ideally with automatic updates. Debian’s an obvious pick. Alpine could be great for something like this. Gentoo could be awesome too, but there’s a serious learning curve involved.

Did it currently have windows installed? If so, have you turned off secure boot and fastboot?

If you’ve done all that already, then maybe try adding nomodeset to the kernel parameters in grub. You can find instructions by searching how to set kernel parameters. It’s fairly easy, but kind of a pain to explain.

I wouldn’t mind there being a whole community devoted to pointing out shit that is poorly designed or just broken

But isn’t that every linux forum?

Yep, I’ve got a stack of 5-10 year old optiplexes (optiplexi?) running proxmox.

In the US, many public universities allow access to the public, including use of computer terminals that will allow access to paid databases. In many cases, you could bring in a usb stick and save copies of articles downloaded from such databases, or at worst you could pay a small fee to print some stuff out. AFAIK, that kind of access varies state by state though, so you need to call university libraries near you to find out.

You say this machine is headless. Is it at a remote location? If not, is it feasible to connect it to a monitor an keyboard for a few minutes? If so then you could logout, switch DE, and then log back in. That would hopefully set the DE you prefer as user default.

If that’s not possible, then some of the solutions discussed here might be applicable.