Ansible has extensive tools for applying partial configs to specific configuration files, leaving the rest unchanged.

It’s meant for remote hosts, but it works fine pointed at localhost.

Ansible might be overkill - might be enough to make a quick bash script that finds the most recently active Firefox profile and just drops the files you care about there.

This does sound like more than most dotfile managers as are able to handle.

…what?

I forgot that other competitive games exist. I only play Pac-Man.

Why would you single out MMO veterans in this scenario?

Not op, but I took it as being because MMOs are the only one form of modern games where anyone really cares if the player cheats. So MMOs tend not to leave developer cheat codes lying around.

(Edit: Yes, other competitive games do exist, I guess.)

I mean, Microsoft could supply an option to safely install Linux as a dual boot, alongside Windows, done by Windows, itself.

That is the only way I would trust such a tool, and even then, I might not.

There’s so much closed source code involved in doing it that way - it feels like only Microsoft staff could have any hope to verify compatibility of all the necessary components.

Booting to a Live USB Linux first provides a clean-room - a known, publicly verified open source platform - to perform the installation from.

Such a clean room can be avhieved within Windows, but only by Microsoft engineers with full access to the entirety of Microsoft’s source code.

Once time I’ve had two bad installs in a row, it was due to my install media.

Many install media tools have an image checker (check-sum) step, which is meant to prevent this.

But corrupt downloads and corrupt writes to the USB key can happen.

In my case, I think it turned out that my USB key was slowly dying.

If I recall, I got very unlucky that it behaved during the checksums, but didn’t behave during the installs. (Or maybe I foolishly skipped a checksum step - I have been known to get impatient.)

I got a new USB key and then I was back on track.

Sorry for your headaches. The door prize is you get to tell this story - to the un-envy of peers - in the future.

or load vim to practice vim motions

Because I sometimes forget, here’s your reminder that vim has a built in :vimtutor command which I have found surpringly good for a few minutes of guided practice now and then.

If you need to reimage it, it sounds like you’re looking for “Headless Rasbian”. As others have said, it is based on Debian.

A lot of stuff I want to learn/practice “work” on windows but are native to Linux, like vim/neovim nmap gcc etc. Is this feasible?

Absolutely. And it’s fun.

Am I under estimating what’s possible with it?

Haha. Yeah. I read somewhere that the Pi3 is the most capable budget PC ever produced, and I have no reason to doubt that claim.

But you can always do more with it later. May as well start with trying what you’re interested in now.

At least 2000 is both the largest number, and the best OS, in that group. :)

I tried to get on board with this one, but “cross platform apps” made me throw up in my mouth a little. The unholy things we did back then are best left forgotten in their shallow binary graves.