I second OpenSnitch. It's the most annoying program i run, but the control it gives you over your outbound connections is so worth it from a security and privacy standpoint.

Once you start and run this you get to truly see how many different URLs are loaded when visiting just one website

I believe in situations like filesystem corruption you can recreate the filesystem, make sure not to format, and you'll get back the files that weren't corrupted. Not 100% certain this works for NTFS tho

I'm not a kernel expert but found a good way to solve the "which modules do i need" delimma is to use modprobed-db. First compile with all modules, run modprobed-db every once in a while to store which modules are loaded and then run "make localmodconfig".

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Modprobed-db

Have you ever compiled your own kernel? Could be the upgraded version doesn't enable a module your motherboard needed or something. A fairly simple test would be to compile thw kernel with everything enabled as a module and use that

I feel like if CA were to leave the US it would join Mexico, not Canada

KurtVonnegut does that

I was just thinking this. All one big illusion that we can't understand because the universe evolves across billions of years; and we as humans haven't even been here for a million

I ended up installing the nox package manager on my gentoo machine, and it's been useful so far. Got some packages installed that aren't in the native Gentoo repo

Genuinely curious cause i don't know much nixos, does it support an equivalent to USE flags or slots?

Or Gentoo? I haven't used nixos yet so cant speak on it but Gentoo has been awesome to tinker and learn with.

I just started using it in the past month or so. I doubt I'll ever go back to any other distro. I tried it once in the past but gave up because I didn't have the time to actually learn it. Now that I have it's amazing. I like having control over not only what packages get installed (ala Arch) but also what is contained in those packages.

It's been a lot of fun learning and renewed my love for computing.

Edit: been using Linux for about 20 years now. Started with Ubuntu