ipacialsection

I was speaking of the Debian "full archive" 21-DVD sets: https://www.shoplinuxonline.com/debian-full.html

But I don't know about how they package it, so it might not be a "box set" as you describe.

No distro I'm aware of still provides official box sets and CDs. Debian still provides materials for third parties to make them, though. Most of the vendors of pre-burned Linux media have also shut down, but one that seems to still exist (and offers Debian box sets) is https://www.shoplinuxonline.com/ .

Debian Stable, in my experience, can stay online for months, even over a year, with very little attention, and still work as well as you left it. You can also install RHEL or a rebuild, like AlmaLinux, RockyLinux, or Oracle Linux, as a workstation distro.

As for the device, my use case is fairly different so I'm not sure what to suggest. Maybe an Intel NUC, or a Framework laptop.

Wasn't screenfetch the thing neofetch was supposed to replace? Apparently it has more recent development activity (5 months ago), anyway...

From the sounds of it, the OS might not be starting at all, which is a very strange thing to happen after installing a desktop environment. My best guess is that apt uninstalled something important. As other folks said Ubuntu 24.04 is pretty unstable at the moment, so you might have more luck with Fedora, or Ubuntu 22.04 or 23.10. One thing you could try is booting into your (K)ubuntu live medium and running sudo grub-install /dev/sda, to reinstall the bootloader, just in case something broke it.

Pressing F12 while the Framework logo is visible (but before the OS starts) opens the BIOS boot menu. I assumed incorrectly that that is what you were trying to do with Escape. Trying to boot that way might help elucidate why the OS won't start. You could also get into BIOS settings that way, or boot a USB drive.

Can you be more specific about what happens when you reboot? Does it go to blank screen, a blinking cursor, or just shut itself off? Does the operating system start and just get stuck somewhere in the boot process, or does it not even get that far?

I think F12 is the BIOS key, if that helps. If it attempts to boot the operating system, you can press one of the arrow keys to see the boot log.

chmod'd all my home directory's files and folders recursively. First to 600, which prevented me from listing any folders, then to 700, which broke a few programs, then to 755, which broke ssh.

Yeah, basically. makepkg automates the process of creating an Arch package, and while usually that involves compiling source code, sometimes it just means converting proprietary software that has already been compiled into a different format.

In that case makepkg isn't compiling anything, it's just packaging the existing binaries so that they can be more easily installed and recognized by your package manager.

Open-source software is distributed primarily as source code in a human-readable programming language. Computers can't actually read these programming languages directly; they need to be translated into the machine language of their CPU (such as x86_64). For some languages, like Python, code can be "interpreted" on the fly; for others, like C, programs must be "compiled" into a separate file format. Additionally, most programs consist of multiple files that need to be compiled and linked together, and installed in certain folders on your system, so the compiler and additional tools work to automate that process.

Most users of Linux rarely if ever have to compile anything, because the developers of Linux distros, and some third parties like Flathub, curate collections of (mostly) open-source software that has already been compiled and packaged into formats that are easy to install and uninstall. As part of this process, they usually add some metadata and/or scripts that can automate compiling and packaging, so it only requires a single command (makepkg on Arch, dpkg-buildpackage on Debian.) However, some newer or more obscure software may not be packaged by your distribution or any third-party repo.

How to compile depends on the program, its programming language and what tools the developers prefer to use to compile it. Usually the README file included with source code explains how to compile the software. The most common process uses the commands ./configure; make; sudo make install after installing all of the program's dependencies and cd-ing to the source code directory. Other programs might include the metadata needed for something like makepkg to work, be written in an interpreted language and thus require no compilation, or use a different toolchain, like CMake.

Last time I used Elementary OS, it was great if you were only using the official apps, with insane degrees of polish, but things like LibreOffice were surprisingly hard to configure the way I wanted. That was a while ago, though.

I still follow Planet KDE and Planet Debian, and can vouch for both. They're great for both learning about the development processes of those projects, and finding interesting blogs on unrelated topics that happen to have been written or linked by the contributors.