I remember seeing dates displayed in the wrong case. It felt like reading “June 15th of the mondays”. (and it would translate back to something pretty close to that)

Or Big Bad Cartel?

Sway’s default keybind for opening a terminal is super+return (line 68)

    # Start a terminal
    bindsym $mod+Return exec $term

note also that sway uses the foot terminal by default. (line 17)

# Your preferred terminal emulator
set $term foot

You can change these in the config.

It’s a good idea to read a bit about a WM from a wiki before use:
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Sway
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Sway

As others have already noted, the handbook is very good. You should be able to manage with limited Linux & terminal skills. (terminal navigation, can install a package with e.g. apt, etc.)

If you’re unsure about your skills, try using the terminal a bit. You can start with switching to the apt cli (command-line program) if you’re using a gui client. Or, you could try to do some basic, everyday tasks with it, like editing text with nano (or vim, if you’re feeling brave).

Just don’t forget to install important packages when installing Gentoo, like sudo (and add youself to sudoers), a DE/WM (KDE Plasma, GNOME, Sway, etc.) and a terminal. These things can be done later, by rebooting to the install media and chrooting, but it can be a bit annoying.

Don’t worry too much about mistakes, as everything is fixable, except things related to bad UEFI implementations.

Like others, I would recommend going with defaults for now. You can always tinker after the install. While a few things are a real pain to change or shouldn’t be changed, like going from no-multilib to multilib, most things can be played with later. Though I haven’t done it with a Gentoo system specifically, going from an unencypted system to encrypting all disks is very much possible.

1. I’ve heard good things about CUPS for printing, not sure about the wd drive app & msi dragon center.
2. Not really, with exceptions:

• Appimages are a Linux equivalent of Windows’ EXE files. Everything the program requires to run is contained in a single file, which can be run anywhere.
• Statically linked applications, for example, a lot of software written in Rust & Go, also include everything needed to run, but in a different, more compact way.
• Not what you want or mean, but source-based distributions, like Gentoo do not distribute ready-to-run software*, but rather scripts/instructions for building for source in an automatic manner. This decouples the file you get from your distribution from the required library versions somewhat, in a way, increasing backwards compatibility a bit.

3. You can, although you should use the system’s package manager, if possible. You can just download an appimage or a statically linked executable and give it the executable permission (chmod +x <path-to-program>) and run the file.
4. First, beware that Wine is malware compatible! Wine — upon which Valve’s Proton is based — can be used to run Windows programs & games on Linux (and MacOS). Alternatively, you can use umu-launcher to launch non-steam programs with Proton. If you encounter problems with Wine, you could try looking into the Lutris launcher, winetricks & the winedb website.
5. You ask multiple things here: 5.1. Flag emojis: Yes, so long as you have fonts with them installed. (They probably are on Ubuntu) Flag emojis are interesting that they’re just 2 special characters, representing a country code. If you have a font that specifies a flag for a country with the code “FR”, you get support for the French flag emoji. There is also nothing stopping a font from including flag emojis for fictional or historical flags. 5.2 Codecs: Yup, HEVC (H.265) and others are supported at no cost. FFmpeg supports it, so you can transcode video on Linux. Just be aware of the quality loss from lossy->lossy conversion.
6. Yes, Wine works offline.
7. See points 2 & 3. Also, if you have a package file (.deb for Debian-based distributions like Ubuntu), you can use the package manager to install it. Well, so long as you have its dependencies either installed or as package files stored offline. You can also run a repository offline, but that’s probably not really useful to you. Be aware that you should assume package files to be distro-specific, unless otherwise specified. (A .deb file without dependencies could run on both Debian & Ubuntu. If I remember, EndeavourOS uses Arch’s repositories, so it should be compatible with Arch.)
8. Yes, Wine can run .bat files. Wine contains a terminal program (windecmd or winecommand I think), which works like a windows command prompt window.

_{*With exceptions}

If you have other questions or if anything remains unclear, ask away!

Hyprland, trying to go back to sway.

A microkernel wouldn’t be that useful without a stable module interface, which won’t be coming anytime soon.

But that would be communist!

Don’t you know that a society can’t be truly free unless the ones with power have the freedom to oppress those who don’t?

I’ve been pretty happy with OCR.

being scrapped by bots.

I think you might have meant "scraped’. I don’t think that AI companies would throw away valuable training data without a goo reason.

it’s probably a file

Maybe, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were only kept in memory, being monitor-specific & re-retrievable.

If it’s not stored in a file, perhaps KDE cli tools or debug utilities could help.

I see that you don’t use a shell with completions.

Anna’s archive, known for “open-sourced” books. They scraped spotify recently.

まず、総理から前線へ。

I’m still learning japanese, but I think it translates to something like: “First, to the warzone, prime minister.”

I don’t remember having seen から used like that before, but I can’t think of anything else that would make sense.

Edit: fixed transcription.

Does Chinese only have the one 1st person pronoun?

Well, a few niche topics are well/over represented. Linux & Communism are very niche in real life, at least in my experience, but quite well represented here.

Disclaimer: I’m learning Japanese & I don’t know Chinese.

It looks like the original character for the 3rf person pronoun is now the masculine pronoun & the female pronoun is made by substituting the person component (人, I don’t know how to type the left-component form) with the woman component (女).

my new laptop literally is more than double in each spec

13.6"

Where did you find a laptop with a 27.2" or larger screen?

No, I don’t want to “turn children on”.

Depends on your religion, I guess. The Flying Spaghetti Monster seems pretty edible.