ipacialsection

Debian Stable, in my experience, can stay online for months, even over a year, with very little attention, and still work as well as you left it. You can also install RHEL or a rebuild, like AlmaLinux, RockyLinux, or Oracle Linux, as a workstation distro.

As for the device, my use case is fairly different so I'm not sure what to suggest. Maybe an Intel NUC, or a Framework laptop.

I've honestly never wrestled with Secure Boot in this way; I usually disable it if it won't let me boot my preferred kernel. From my brief online searches, enrolling your own keys is possible, but that depends on the kernel modules being signed in the first place, and carries risk of bricking devices if not done correctly. So you might just want to disable Secure Boot, or otherwise stick to kernels provided by your distribution.

You're looking at bootloaders, not kernels; you need to enroll the kernel with one of those bootloaders. Usually running sudo update-grub while in the OS will automatically detect and add any available kernels to the default version of GRUB.

If you can't boot into the OS, you can select the kernel manually from the GRUB command line: https://www.unix-ninja.com/p/Manually_booting_the_Linux_kernel_from_GRUB

I can't object to more Jett Reno!

Wasn't screenfetch the thing neofetch was supposed to replace? Apparently it has more recent development activity (5 months ago), anyway...

From the sounds of it, the OS might not be starting at all, which is a very strange thing to happen after installing a desktop environment. My best guess is that apt uninstalled something important. As other folks said Ubuntu 24.04 is pretty unstable at the moment, so you might have more luck with Fedora, or Ubuntu 22.04 or 23.10. One thing you could try is booting into your (K)ubuntu live medium and running sudo grub-install /dev/sda, to reinstall the bootloader, just in case something broke it.

Pressing F12 while the Framework logo is visible (but before the OS starts) opens the BIOS boot menu. I assumed incorrectly that that is what you were trying to do with Escape. Trying to boot that way might help elucidate why the OS won't start. You could also get into BIOS settings that way, or boot a USB drive.

Can you be more specific about what happens when you reboot? Does it go to blank screen, a blinking cursor, or just shut itself off? Does the operating system start and just get stuck somewhere in the boot process, or does it not even get that far?

I think F12 is the BIOS key, if that helps. If it attempts to boot the operating system, you can press one of the arrow keys to see the boot log.

I honestly have only passing knowledge of it, but my understanding is that Open Build Service is more for sharing software whose source code you are allowed to distribute. If you aren't looking to distribute at all, the solutions other users suggested might be better.

There's also a way to create an APT repository entirely on your own system, without a web server, which I haven't tried myself, but a DuckDuckGo search found this: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories/Personal

Unsure if this is what you're looking for, but I've seen some FOSS projects use https://www.makedeb.org/ and https://openbuildservice.org/ to create public Debian repos.

Unfortunately, the state of Android music players is not great. Currently I have two FOSS music players installed: Metro Music Player (the F-Droid version of Retro Music Player) and mucke. mucke has a ton of really cool features that improve the shuffle experience but it's actually worse than most apps at pulling album art. Retro/Metro has beautiful UI, and has pretty good features for customization, but lacks the cool features mucke has and is less stable. Both have more than one annoying bug, but it took me a while to find music players that had this few dealbreakers.

chmod'd all my home directory's files and folders recursively. First to 600, which prevented me from listing any folders, then to 700, which broke a few programs, then to 755, which broke ssh.

Yeah, basically. makepkg automates the process of creating an Arch package, and while usually that involves compiling source code, sometimes it just means converting proprietary software that has already been compiled into a different format.