major upgrade like from kernel 6 to 7

What do you mean? The Linux kernel doesn’t follow SemVer.

The 6.19 -> 7.0 version bump didn’t have any more inherent meaning than 7.0 -> 7.1 or 7.1 -> 7.2.

Don’t forget the young’uns at DOGE. They wouldn’t use something so lame & gay like Viagra. They only use Swedish-made penis enlarger pumps.

Then, finally, ban it for 15 year olds as well.

kAppIcon is a small icon manager for KDE Plasma and other freedesktop desktops.

According to the Readme, yes.

I didn’t look too deeply, but I assume it modifies .desktop files stored in $XDG_DATA_HOME/applications/ and/or copies system.desktop files there to override them with modified versions.

If it works like I assume, it should work with anything that reads .desktop files from the standard locations.

How else do you clean your sharks? I mean, while you could use a feather duster, they don’t react well to them, so I wouldn’t recommend it.

Does Ventoy still have a blob problem?

You can also use the eject command. It used the device path (eg. /dev/sda), not the mountpoint.

Thanks! I’ll give swaylock another chance. I’m currently moving back to sway from the Hypr* ecosystem.

How much do sway{,lock}-effects add to the experience?

How did you rice swaylock? Would you mind sharing your config?

I’d say that it looks pretty detailed to be called SimpleX, perhaps a better name could be something like CompleX?

I get address not found.

Edit: I can access the site through Tor. Yay for censorship circumvention!

Sway’s default keybind for opening a terminal is super+return (line 68)

    # Start a terminal
    bindsym $mod+Return exec $term

note also that sway uses the foot terminal by default. (line 17)

# Your preferred terminal emulator
set $term foot

You can change these in the config.

It’s a good idea to read a bit about a WM from a wiki before use:
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Sway
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Sway

Why the hell would you use punctuation?

Seems kind of unnecessary at the end there, doesn’t it? Not like the sentence has anything to do with the country.

It’s how life tends to evolve into crab-like forms. I’m not good at thinking up usernames, so it was the best I came up with. I like the Rust language, and the language’s mascot is a crab. So, my username is about the tendency of codebases to turn to Rust.

As others have already noted, the handbook is very good. You should be able to manage with limited Linux & terminal skills. (terminal navigation, can install a package with e.g. apt, etc.)

If you’re unsure about your skills, try using the terminal a bit. You can start with switching to the apt cli (command-line program) if you’re using a gui client. Or, you could try to do some basic, everyday tasks with it, like editing text with nano (or vim, if you’re feeling brave).

Just don’t forget to install important packages when installing Gentoo, like sudo (and add youself to sudoers), a DE/WM (KDE Plasma, GNOME, Sway, etc.) and a terminal. These things can be done later, by rebooting to the install media and chrooting, but it can be a bit annoying.

Don’t worry too much about mistakes, as everything is fixable, except things related to bad UEFI implementations.

Like others, I would recommend going with defaults for now. You can always tinker after the install. While a few things are a real pain to change or shouldn’t be changed, like going from no-multilib to multilib, most things can be played with later. Though I haven’t done it with a Gentoo system specifically, going from an unencypted system to encrypting all disks is very much possible.

What does the “li” after the end of your sentence mean?

Why does everyone seem to regard the em dash as an instant LLM-indicator? Many real people—me included—use them regularly. Yes, LLMs use them—perhaps too much—but many so-called “AI-tells” come from training data—real text written by real people.

Because they used the ϟ rune twice. When used like that, it only has one meaning.

1. I’ve heard good things about CUPS for printing, not sure about the wd drive app & msi dragon center.
2. Not really, with exceptions:

• Appimages are a Linux equivalent of Windows’ EXE files. Everything the program requires to run is contained in a single file, which can be run anywhere.
• Statically linked applications, for example, a lot of software written in Rust & Go, also include everything needed to run, but in a different, more compact way.
• Not what you want or mean, but source-based distributions, like Gentoo do not distribute ready-to-run software*, but rather scripts/instructions for building for source in an automatic manner. This decouples the file you get from your distribution from the required library versions somewhat, in a way, increasing backwards compatibility a bit.

3. You can, although you should use the system’s package manager, if possible. You can just download an appimage or a statically linked executable and give it the executable permission (chmod +x <path-to-program>) and run the file.
4. First, beware that Wine is malware compatible! Wine — upon which Valve’s Proton is based — can be used to run Windows programs & games on Linux (and MacOS). Alternatively, you can use umu-launcher to launch non-steam programs with Proton. If you encounter problems with Wine, you could try looking into the Lutris launcher, winetricks & the winedb website.
5. You ask multiple things here: 5.1. Flag emojis: Yes, so long as you have fonts with them installed. (They probably are on Ubuntu) Flag emojis are interesting that they’re just 2 special characters, representing a country code. If you have a font that specifies a flag for a country with the code “FR”, you get support for the French flag emoji. There is also nothing stopping a font from including flag emojis for fictional or historical flags. 5.2 Codecs: Yup, HEVC (H.265) and others are supported at no cost. FFmpeg supports it, so you can transcode video on Linux. Just be aware of the quality loss from lossy->lossy conversion.
6. Yes, Wine works offline.
7. See points 2 & 3. Also, if you have a package file (.deb for Debian-based distributions like Ubuntu), you can use the package manager to install it. Well, so long as you have its dependencies either installed or as package files stored offline. You can also run a repository offline, but that’s probably not really useful to you. Be aware that you should assume package files to be distro-specific, unless otherwise specified. (A .deb file without dependencies could run on both Debian & Ubuntu. If I remember, EndeavourOS uses Arch’s repositories, so it should be compatible with Arch.)
8. Yes, Wine can run .bat files. Wine contains a terminal program (windecmd or winecommand I think), which works like a windows command prompt window.

_{*With exceptions}

If you have other questions or if anything remains unclear, ask away!