That's pretty much what I do, spin up a container for anything I need to do and everything is within that.. once I've finished I blow the container away and all the dependencies go with it. Currently use proxmox as a frontend for that although I ran on the command line for ages before switching to a beefier server.

I do the same with docker - nest it in a container so everything is together (and also so it can't screw around with the host networking). eg. my lemmy container has the lemmy docker and its dependencies together.

You can control that using TC, also add latency and packet loss if you want. It's really powerful, although a bit difficult to learn.

And half of those use a linux kernel (the other half is derived from NextSTEP :p).

Then there's the steamdeck, which proves people really don't pick operating systems, they just use what's there... which is really the point.. you don't 'adopt' an OS, you just use shit. If it happens to run linux, then cool.

Missed opportunity to talk about tar being a tape format that we just happen to use on disks too (so it's accessed linearly, and in fact if you cat two tar files together they make a valid tar file.. or you can create a multi volume tar file that'll prompt you to change the tape).

In the UK all our questions were things like 'You are about to drive into a wall, do you (a) honk your horn, (b) speed up, (c) stop'.

The rule was if there was a 'stop' answer, use that one, otherwise use the 'slow down' answer. You'd pass easily.

I always wondered if one day they'd throw in a curve ball.. 'you are being chased by a hoard of zombies..'

I'd say write it for yourself then worry about the cross platform later. You can always go back and rewrite.

That sounds like the kind of stuff we make at $dayjob (that's for the building trade, where they often have complex spreadsheets and going to an app that calculates everything down to the number of screws for them is a huge benefit).

You could probably still do it with a spreadsheet, just have parts list add/remove fan out into the cutting list and update automatically. I imagine it'd get quite ugly, but doable. If you want to do optimisation (buy 1 5 foot length and cut rather than 2 2 foot lengths, because it's cheaper, for example) it gets even uglier and at that point a bespoke app becomes more sensible.

You really want to do it that way anyway.. process the files to a new set of files. That way when you screw it up going back is just deleting the new files, fixing and rerunning.

I did it from stage 1 once.. wasn't a fast computer either. You have to compile the tools to compile the tools. Then compile the base packages, then everything else..

Alas you can't do that any more. Pity as it was fun.

Gallium is discontinued since last year, and not recommended any more.

You might find just the inbuilt linux (crostini) under chromeos is fine.. it's basically debian.

If you want just a linux box you basically start by installing coreboot to turn it into something more like a standard PC. See https://mrchromebox.tech/ - from the looks of that site the Lenovo isn't supported and the Acer is, but needs hardware modification.

Of course there's always the option of just getting a Thinkpad from ebay - really cheap and can run linux out of the box.

zfs-zed, if you haven't installed it already. It will email you after a scrub, or if there's a failure etc.