@MsDropbear42 Weeeeeeeeell, now i've made time to investigate what ails poor lil ol' ONT, & it seems pretty terminal [boom, tish]. The failure to finish booting occurred after i did a system update after not doing so for several months. OS was #SparkyLinux Testing / semi-rolling. Afaict, whatever caused the damage did a pretty good job:

• the #bootloader had vaporised
• the #LUKS #encryption seems to have been damaged [even booting from a Live usb stick couldn't unlock the drive, my LUKS pswd being rejected despite absolutely certainly being correct]; it accepts my LUKS password during boot, then says "Slot 0 opened", then... just sits there, evermore. Sigh.

I considered trying to repair the bootloader via a #chroot, but even if that succeeded i frankly had little appetite to then do battle with a sulky LUKS. This pc is a very old clunker, spinning rust HDDs only, merely 8 GB RAM, i7 though old model, & i'd repurposed it to be my lounge-room media pc several months ago without bothering to change anything about its extant OS... & tbh Sparky had been wearing a bit thin on me anyway for a coupla months in this role.

So i decided not to bother attempting repairs, & instead make a clean break with an alternative distro that i feel should be just about ideal for this use as a media pc, whose only function is to run a browser, & my VPN app, for my nightly movies & shows streaming. As such, i really just don't wanna be arsed with running updates on it often, & generally mollycoddling it like i do with my real pooter [#ArchLinux #KDE #Plasma]... i just want it to live happily in the darkness of my timber cabinet, asking little of me re upkeep, & just purring away.

Thus, it now has #LinuxMint #LMDE 6. Gotta hand it to ol' Clem & Co; they've done a really nice job with it.

@alternativeto

## #SparkyLinux

https://sparkylinux.org

SparkyLinux is a #gnulinux #distribution based on the #Debian GNU/Linux operating system.

### Features of Sparky
– Debian based
– stable or (semi-)rolling release
– lightweight, fast & simple
– your favorite desktops to choose
– special editions: GameOver, Multimedia & Rescue
– CLI Edition (no X) for building customized desktop
– set of selected applications, multimedia codecs and plugins