This is a good one. I’m keeping it to use for others, thanks.

These are some rules of mindset I’ve given to others in the past when trying linux-based operating systems.

1. Don’t try to apply the same computing and productivity patterns you’ve learned from Windows. Don’t try to force Windows concepts onto Linux OS, you will confuse yourself and get frustrated.
2. If something doesn’t work the way you expect it to, doesn’t mean it’s broken.
3. Just because something doesn’t behave the same as in Windows, doesn’t mean it’s worse. It’s probably designed that way for a good reason.
4. If your daily work routine or gaming life revolves around the use programs developed specifically for the Windows platform, you’re gonna need to invest time and effort to try to recreate that in Linux. It may not even be possible to fully replicate it. And that’s not the fault of Linux, it’s not designed to be a drop-in Windows replacement.
5. Everyone has their own taste and preferences. Just like some people prefer driving a manual car and some prefer auto. If you try Linux and hate it, that’s okay, that doesn’t make you bad or wrong, but keep in mind that those who do prefer Linux are not weird or daft or wrong either.

Yeah, I remember reading this last year.

I did Gentoo from stage 1 too back in the day, it’s was a valuable learning experience for me, and those skills helped me to fix things when they went wrong down the track.

Yep, not bricked. Just frozen.

There are two forms of bricked:

1. hard bricked. This is when a software change (eg, installing a custom firmware) caused the system to fail to boot, and there is no possible way to ever get it to run again.
2. soft bricked. Where a software change caused the failure to boot but there is a way (eg, reflashing using UART) to recover back to an older version that does boot.

Both are terms from the Phone modding community (ie, a phone has become as useful as a brick after this update) it’s quite hard to actually brick a modern PC.

If you take the plunge and switch to systemd-boot it’s worth it. It’s the only boot manager I’ve tried in the last decade that feels like an upgrade from GRUB.