Hey you tried it. That’s an achievement. Good job. Sorry it didn’t work out.

I have been using alpine on a Chromebook. Its similar to Debian, but is very small. I use sway on Wayland, its not hard to learn, but most desktops are available. If your just playingwithe the laptop, try it out. Following the instructions is not as hard as it seems. https://alpinelinux.org/

I don’t have a source, some looking will find it, but NASA used to have to be in the public domain. Now they partner, and the partner gets the patents. I know the Apollo soyez mating hardware was public domain, and apas docking is still.

I also seem to remember that research paid for by the USA, used to have to stay public.

I don’t have a source to quote, just memory.

There really is no good reason for not being open source.

Sure, that is really the reason for scripting. They are called cron jobs, because they run on a schedule. Its a command called crontab. Unix is all about doing things automatically. Takes a bit of time to set up, but then it does what you want, when you want it. Your going to love it once you use it. Edit: spelling

When Linux boots, it does not always use the first port on the video card. Sometimes the bios will display on the onboard video, then when the kernel boots, it will change to a different video port. I find with multiple video ports, its best to plug in all of them till you figure out which ones work. Nvidia is not well supported, and most video cards have problems in Linux. Generally, if you have to use a proprietary driver, it will have specific issues. The free drivers will just be buggy. Best is to see what cards are known to work well. There are maintained, well there used to be, lists of hardware that works well. If you installed proprietary drivers, they are often difficult to remove. There is not always instructions on how to uninstall. So part of your problems might be the drivers.

So that would be just a script in Linux. Bash, the shell for the command line, allows for scripting. Its like a simple program that you can set to run at times. Might take a few tries to get it right, but a little reading and a few tries anyone could get something like that working.

Sounds like a nifty program. Is this something you use a lot? What’s the use case? While I know extracting files is not difficult in Linux, there are a lot of different compressed file types. Most have some Linux alternative. Linux is different from windows, in that most things that require a separate program to be installed, are usually default operations. Most file managers offer to compress or extract in the right click menu. Try a live distro for a few days. It will blow your mind.