My experience with cats: unless you’re willing to reapply the finish every couple of months as the cat removes it (in which case use a food-safe oil and keep in mind that cats notice smells) leave it unfinished. The cat won’t care, and we’ve had several that actually preferred raw wood (the current one is a cardboard junkie, though, so he’s happy with cheap scratching pads from the store).

Alas, my only holiday project is getting the three dining chairs whose crossbars have fallen apart fixed before anyone shows up to sit in them. Not difficult, except that not a single thing I’m going to need to clamp is flat and square.

If you don’t already have fabric you’re intending to use, you might also consider paper as an option. Paper of the type used in Japanese shoji screens, that is, not office bond paper.

Experiencing a bit of plane envy here, since the only one I inherited was trash and yours looks very nice indeed.

Hmm. If I’m visualizing this correctly, and depending on the size of the table . . .

Two pairs of legs with stretchers in between, on pivots that allow them to fold up agains the bottom of the table, slighly offset so that the legs end up alongside each other when folded instead of interfering. If you want them to touch the bottom of the tub, set them up to fold at the “knees” rather than the “thigh”, if you see what I mean. The difficult part is figuring out how to secure them in the extended position. If you’re okay with putting in a couple of bolts whenever you unfold, you could add a couple of supports that link the stretchers to the underside of the table at an angle (pivot at the other end again). Or you could attach a length of wood to one stretcher with a pivot and notch the other end so that when the table is unfolded, it drops over the other stretcher and forms a tight cross half-lap joint.

All this requires gluing or screwing hinges or bits of wood pierced for dowels or screws to the bottom of the table to form the pivots.

letting cats roam outside is objectively harmful.

That’s very situational. If you’re in a rural or semi-rural area that has small wildcats (or foxes or similar) already, adding a handful of domestic cats isn’t going to disrupt anything much. The only reason to keep cats inside in such a place is for their own safety (from larger predators like coyotes, and from highway traffic).

If you’re in Australia, Antarctica, or a protected island biome with no native small wildcats or canids, or you have a known endangered species in the area that cats are likely to prey upon, that changes the equation. If you’re in a highly urban area, that changes things in a different way, because the danger to outdoor cats from traffic and other human activity rises exponentially.

Very unlikely this person is a grandparent—up until about 40 years ago, most cats outside highly built-up downtown areas were allowed to free-roam, so an older person would see it as normal.

One thing that’s helped me a bit in similar circumstances was to find the manual (by searching on-line, since the paper ones don’t tend to survive in our household). Even 30-50 years ago, they were pretty good at telling you what to absolutely not do, in order to reduce the number of lawsuits flung at the manufacturer. Also a nice-to-have for maintenance purposes.

(Now if only I could find the one for that damned drill press . . .)

If your local library is no good, you can also try Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=woodworking. Has an exhaustively detailed book on joints in particular, plus an assortment of beginners’ manuals. A lot of hand tool stuff hasn’t changed all that much in the past century.

Saves a trip to the store, and the cost of a more expensive (because inflation) new can.

I ended up with a 103-key Unicomp New Model M (essentially the same layout as a 101-key, but with one Windows key and one context menu key stuffed into what would have been the small blank spaces in the bottom row between ctrl and alt—I really wanted a full-length spacebar). Linux is most often installed onto ex-Windows PCs, so it’s hardly surprising that it expects the Windows keyboard layout.

(I believe the current generation of Gnome devs is big on minimalism, AKA omitting or removing features. I can understand the appeal from a code maintenance point of view, but it’s never been a DE that I liked.)

You can buy keyboards with replaceable keycaps. You can also buy keycaps with Tux logos on them for at least some of those keyboards. You can decide for yourself whether your aesthetic dislike of the Windows logo is worth the rather higher price of such a keyboard.

Actually, Gentoo has no restrictions against packaging closed-source software, or even for-pay software. The net-im category is full of closed source.

Closed-source games rarely get packaged, and almost never in the main tree, in part because they all have to be fetch-restricted. The system can’t predict whether you bought from Steam or GOG or some smaller store, or whether you have a means of downloading from that store without user interaction, so it has to send you to download the package yourself and place it in the source directory. That’s considered a black mark against the package. (There was someone a few years ago who was packaging GOG games in an overlay, but they don’t seem to be doing it anymore.) In general, no distro will package this stuff—you’re better off installing Steam and having it manage your games.

As for build times, get used to letting updates involving large packages run unattended overnight. Sort out the dependencies, issue an emerge with --keep-going, and go to bed. Works for PI3s and my Athlon64x2 laptop, anyway. (If this is still intolerable for you, maybe Arch would be a better fit?)

Finally, you may not be aware that the most complete list of Gentoo-packaged software available is not on the official site, but at gpo.zugaina.org, which also indexes ebuilds in overlays and Bugzilla.

Installing Gentoo requires you to 1. follow a long list of instructions (correctly, in order, without skipping) and 2. be willing to make some decisions about your system setup. I don’t consider that painful, but some people apparently do. It’s also useful to bring a book or some other secondary form of entertainment to occupy yourself with during the non-interactive parts of the install process. Once the initial install is done, you can minimize wasted time by starting updates right before leaving the computer, or just configure it to always leave one core free for your interactive needs.

Gentoo has never been an appropriate distribution for new Linux users with no technical background, or people who want their system to “just work” without caring about how. It’s always been about choice, and its flexibility is both a strength and a weakness. Regardless, the OP did the correct thing by not including it in their guide.

Rolling release distros don’t do this. Gentoo isn’t versioned. I’d guess that Arch isn’t either. Not that you’re the first person to look at an issue that exists only with some distros and assume it extends to all of Linux (and I doubt you’ll be the last).

There are two different RDP implementations in Linux: freerdp (which is the underlying library for remmina as well) and rdesktop. Each has its own set of bugs. No idea if rdesktop offers better support for what you want to do—I use it, but I only have single-monitor setups at both ends. (It has an annoying bug that can make it require multiple attempts to establish a connection, though.)

Tried to register with gitlab three times some months back to file a bug against qemu. It rejected my registration silently every time (as in, it appeared to take it but never sent a confirmation email, not even one that got mistaken for spam). I gave up on filing the bug.

Or sed the existing config file at the end of your script.

And the issue that does exist doesn’t even require Linux to be installed, technically. Unless you’re an IT pro administering large numbers of systems that boot from a network disk image, there is nothing for you to worry about here.

Gentoo does have systemd, actually—package sys-apps/systemd—and there are optional sections in the install documents that explain how to go about using it as your primary init. It’s an officially supported configuration, just not the default.

(But yeah, as for the main problem, sounds like hardware—RAM, your primary hard disk, or the disk controller on the mobo. Start with The Bleeding Obvious and make sure all cables are solid in their sockets and all the RAM is properly inserted.)

For gaming, you should be using the most current version of nvidia’s proprietary drivers that supports your GPU, unless that GPU is really old. Have a look at this page: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/legacy-gpu/

If your GPU isn’t listed there, use the most recent driver you can find.

If your GPU is on the 470.xx supported list, try 470.223.02, as that seems to be the last in the series.

If your GPU is on the 390.xx supported list, try 390.157.

If your GPU is on one of the other lists, it’s a really old chipset and you should be using the Nouveau driver that’s built into the kernel.

If you’re using the nvidia proprietary drivers on a system that also has Nouveau installed, make sure you’ve blacklisted Nouveau so that you’re loading the correct driver.

Dual-graphics laptops are a bit of a bear to work with under Linux generally. Good luck.