Do you know any other distro that’s not LFS or Gentoo that still supports x86? I said a lot, not everything. Most distros don’t support anything below 64-bits.
A fork supported PPC up until a while ago. That project halted though. There was a new spin on it, can’t remember the distro’s name though.
xbps-src can cross compile for MIPS. There are no packages in the repo for MIPS though.
One thing I’ve learned over the years dealing with PC tech is that spinning drives is the one thing you absolutely don’t buy second hand. Plus, you can’t find 4TB or above drives second hand here. People use them till they die or repurpose them.
Second hand PC parts are generally overpriced here. People wanna get like 70, 80% of the price they paid for them. There are some reasonable sellers, but as I said, they usually don’t sell drives or sell drives that no one would need anyway (250GB, 500GB, 1TB spinning drives).
Your last suggestion is kinda good to be honest, I might opt for that.
Have you tried to replicate this behavior in Windows? Try it with a spare drive, see if you get the same irrational thing happening in Windows. If it happens, yeah, it’s a hardware problem 😉… most probably bad caps. Bad batch maybe, even though it’s only 2 years old, who knows.
But, on the other hand Windows is not open source as well and I have to use it for work or an oddball proogram here and there that just doesn’t run on Wine.
Hell, people also use a lot of closed source code in their Linux installs as well. Let’s strat with drivers and firmware binary blobs, printer drivers (binary blobs as well, depends on manufacturer) and end with NLE software like DaVinci Resolve… we use binary blobs all the time, including our phones, and even though none of us asked for that, but instead was shoved down our throat in order to be able to live in a modern society, no one seems to complain about that… but, when a random stranger suggest using something, oh no, that thing most definitely is something malicious 😒.
Run it in a sandbox for a while, see if it calls home. If it does try to call, block it with a firewall, is that so hard 😒… though I’ve never seen it even try to call home or do something malicious, and as I said, I’ve been using it for years. Also, people use a lot of their products, I have yet to see one complaint regarding any of their products doing something malcious.
There is nothing better out there, trust me, I’ve searched. I would love to use something open source, but short of me writing it myself, there is no better solution at the moment… well, at least not for my needs.