Sickday

I can't remember how I rescued it now but managed to get it back without a reinstall

You could've booted into a previous generation where you still had all those things on your system. The glory of atomic distros :)

I did for some time. There's beauty in the simplicity and flexibility of Alpine, plus BusyBox is great once you understand all the weird quirks between it and coreutils. As unpopular as it might be, I actually really like OpenRC. Alpine feels pretty close to BSD if you're familiar with that family of operating systems. These days I use it for just about all my servers save for a few Nix boxes.

If you decide to explore this route, here are a couple tools I found useful at the start:

• Conty - A single executable that launches applications in a standalone Linux Container
• x11docker - Run GUI apps and desktop environments in docker and podman containers.

Also might behoove you to check out Alpine community's documentation on chroots in case you need specific software that isn't available otherwise.

Since no one answered you here, I'll say distrochooser.de isn't bad at all. For the new linux user who is comfortable enough trying new things, I think it's perfect. It does lose its usefulness if you've already tried all of the options it offers, but at that point you probably don't need distrochooser anyway.

Sort of surprised Elite Dangerous never made your list. It seems like it would be right up your alley! I've invested thousands of hours in Elite Dangerous and several thousands hours across the entire Elite franchise.

I've had lots of fun with more recent space games, but to this day Star Citizen's Squadron 42 is the closest I've seen any game come to Elite's level of flight control and maneuvering. I would say it's currently held down by how they try to manage additional content and flushing out existing content. Endgame content isn't as exhilarating as I'd hoped, but there's still plenty to do in the game to keep you busy for hundreds if not thousands of hours.

Elite certainly isn't without it's faults and I'd be pleased to see more contenders in this space (ha!), but I also recognize that space sandbox games are very difficult to get right.

The Asahi Linux project provides a Fedora-based experience for people using Apple Silicon. It works well for the most part but there are features that are still being developed.

As for Windows, I don't know of any methods to get Windows running outside of macOS, but many people utilize Parallels for Windows apps or the desktop experience.

Here's my top 8 in no particular order

• Golden Sun / The Lost Age
• Drill Dozer
• Kirby Nightmare in Dreamland
• Summon Night Swordcraft Story 1/2
• Mega Man Battle Network 3, 5, and 6 (either flavor of each is good)
• Mother 3
• Astro Boy Omega Factor
• Sonic Battle

You should give Squadron 42 a shot on one of their Free Weekends. It's pretty close to Elite as far as flight mechanics and maneuvering goes and a lot more forgiving about getting the parts you want in your ship. It's pretty jank on foot though. Not sure if that's a dealbreaker.

I can reccommend Trilium. I think it has what you're looking for. | Nevermind. Looks like the project is in maintenance mode for now.