Ah, backups. That's on my list of things to check. It would be terribly inconvenient to have to manually pull up a web interface just to do backups.

I like the way you think.

I'll have to give Ventoy another try, since they just had some updates. I had originally tried booting it on a spare laptop (multiple times), but it would never boot, as if the MBR was broken.

• Great advice. I had specific apps I have or was planning to research, but it would probably behoove me to double check everything.
• A live USB is advice I hadn't considered. I've done that several times, and I've done a handful of VMs, but I never considered it might help sus out some potential hardware issues.
• I've actually practiced setting up Arch in a VM, and while I got everything to work just fine, I think pure Arch is just not for me. Something Arch-based would be okay, like BlendOS, but I don't get that nice feeling of accomplishment in pure Arch from tinkering with every little system config file and dependency—just annoyance and exasperation.

Thank you for the history lesson! I can see why their decision might chafe some people or cause them to be a bit more wary (given that many of us live in an end-stage-capitalism hellscape), but as is often the case, real life details are usually mundane.

I've personally been impressed by their Atomic distros, and they've come a long way since I first tried vanilla Fedora with Gnome many years ago.

Windows VM is what I plan to do. I'm already running Bazzite full time on a spare laptop acting as an HTPC, and I've dabbled for the last several years and feel comfortable in the command line, so I don't really see a need to waste an entire drive or partition just for Windows.

That's good advice, though, to learn how to fix the bootloader. That's something I don't currently know how to do, so I'll get on that! Thanks!

I have two drives, but I don't really want to be part of the AI/Recall machine anymore. I'll install Windows in a VM for the rare times I absolutely need it and forget about it the rest of the time.

I always forget about Aurora and Bluefin. Thanks for the reminder!

Why does Leap Micro have such a better logo than the parent project?

One of these days, I'll have to give Universal Blue a look for general computing. Bazzite is excellent, but I don't imagine my MiL is going to care about having Steam and gamescope installed out of the box, should I ever have to do a fresh install for her.

Curious how your atomic distro broke, since you can rollback and rebase pretty easily after a problematic update. I'm running Bazzite on a 10yo laptop, and it's been great; I even rebased to a completely different DE, then did a rollback when I decided it didn't work for me.

Not implying anything, but why don't you trust Red Hat? Because they're a big company, or because of some other reason?