I have no access and, it seems, neither does local IT. Yay.

At the moment i’m getting mount error(13): Permission denied at the new vm (where i was attempting to mount).
dmesg has

[ 9254.003440] CIFS: Attempting to mount \\10.10.10.10\dir\\dir2
[ 9254.181314] CIFS: Status code returned 0xc000006d STATUS_LOGON_FAILURE
[ 9254.181333] CIFS: VFS: \\10.10.10.10 Send error in SessSetup = -13
[ 9254.181367] CIFS: VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -13

Attempting to ls the share in the other vm where it was previously working yields Host is down.
(Everyone else can access the share just fine.)

From my searching around for something similar, these showed up the most: TinyCore, Puppy, Porteus, Absolute, antiX (there’s more).

SP3

As long as mutable distros remain an option

Precisely this, linux is about choice. It’s not like suddenly most distros would change init systems and make it near impossible to choose… oh, wait…
I prefer mutable and see immutable mostly as lazyness but if people wanna use’em go for it, i’m not pushing mutable down their throats.

Maybe icinga?

Some CD trays will auto-close though.

how to install bare arch?

You can try Slackware.
Or LFS for a full zero-to-hero experience.

Gentoo’s still around and quite modern. And USE flags are addictive.

I install the minimal version and go from there.

Ah yes, my daily driv… prayer.

That’s a disclaimer in the bug submission page.

It’s usually the opposite…

PRTFM

True… i compile mine as well.

Linux does have proprietary blobs, Canonical has signed some NDAs, so not that far off from Android (which is linux-based and certainly has proprietary firmware).

looking at you qt-webengine and firefox

You do know gentoo has binary versions of the bigger packages, like LibreOffice and browsers like Firefox, right? Right?

Try Slackware.

and to what scale so that there’s literally a ‘syslog-ng engineer’ job posting

Asking the real questions.

It’s on my todo list.

I think Ubuntu offers ZFS in the installer now, so not really, just go to the advanced options.