Still, huh? Yeah, that is why I stopped using it too.

How does OTR work on it nowadays, or have XMPP moved to some other encryption?

This is such an important thing to learn when using linux. If you want to be able to rescue your setup and not just reinstall: live usb!

To do a rescue on a system that does not boot, then you may also have to enter your environment and fix things, you do that by chroot. I always forget what steps are necessary, so I always look it up in the gentoo handbook: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:AMD64/Full/Installation#Chrooting It is the same principle with any live media.

What kind of issues would one observe from this bug?

I have serious issues with Cosmic. When I lock the screen and come back, then it has kills all terminals except the Cosmic terminal, firefox has become… broken, for the lack of a better word, where all new pages just give gray background color and no menu items work, and the sound is reset to the laptop speaker instead of hdmi, not the disolay though, only sound. Then fullscreening terminals also makes them crash, as in they seem to refuse to take input.

It is not really usable. But since nvidia on x11 in popos started resetting the display config when the screen went to sleep, it beats the alternative.

Look into a distro that you might like, and find a “live usb” of it, often it is the installation media itself. How it works is basically it is a linux already installed on a disk image you transfer to the usb, and tell the computer to boot from it. Instructions on all this usually comes with the live usb media. Then you usually get a “try it out” or “install” option, or it just leaves you at a pre-configured desktop. Click around, install stuff, browse the web, get a feel for it.

I don’t use .desktop files that much… But I guess xfce is X and not wayland. Check the DISPLAY env var for your user and set the same in your script there or run the binary with that env var.

I find it very useful, and it conflicts with normal copy paste very rarely. There are two clipboards, one is filled with latest highlighted, and the other with latest Ctrl+C:ed. Middle click pastes from the first, Ctrl+V from the second. This makes you able to copy two things at once: ctrl+c something first, highlight something else second, paste in any order. The confusing thing when learing to use it for me was that since I need to highlight to ctrl+c, I will overwrite what is in the middle click clipboard, and it also means you cannot highlight something to replace it with whats in your middle click clipboard. It does however mean that most times you want to do a ctrl+c/ctrl+v both clipboards are in sync. Not sure why, but I often find myself having to copy/paste two things at once, and I use both buffers without thinking. Which makes it impossible to use macos.

“Other Unix-like”, do they mean like open/free/netBSD and that class? Because macos does not have that, right? Only some terminals emulate that behaviour by overwriting the normal clipboard, making it very hard to switch between them.

Your control over the system is so great in Gentoo. While other distros may pull in a dependency you will never use – say like cups – gentoo allows you to remove the dependency by removing support for it at install/compile time.

I love how the portage packages are maintained, it is so easy to find which versions are available, select version, read about why a package is masked and having all the tools for overriding that decision by the package maintainers and install anyway. They inform you about important updates and migrations when you sync your package repository. It is also super easy to patch the code being installed.

I would not say portage is complicated. For most operations you just install a package, sync, and upgrade like you would in any distro. It tales time to do this, sure. What is complicated is, I would say, figuring out how to boot your machine. You want encrypted this or that, dropbear, systemd or openrc, want to manage your initramfs with dracut or make one yourself, distro-kernel or another flavour, and on and on. I also think that the wiki is not very detailed on a lot of what the different systems do and how they talk to each other.

Anyway, I love it. If I would start with Gentoo today, I would install a Gentoo Prefix

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Prefix

There you can get used to the portage package manager withour messing up your system and without doing a reinstall.