There is a lot of complexity and overhead involved in either system. But, the benefits of containerizing and using Kubernetes allow you to standardize a lot of other things with your applications. With Kubernetes, you can standardize your central logging, network monitoring, and much more. And from the developers perspective, they usually don’t even want to deal with VMs. You can run something Docker Desktop or Rancher Desktop on the developer system and that allows them to dev against a real, compliant k8s distro. Kubernetes is also explicitly declarative, something that OpenStack was having trouble being.
So there are two swim lanes, as I see it: places that need to use VMs because they are using commercial software, which may or may not explicitly support OpenStack, and companies trying to support developers in which case the developers probably want a system that affords a faster path to production while meeting compliance requirements. OpenStack offered a path towards that later case, but Kubernetes came in and created an even better path.
PS: I didn’t really answer your question”capable” question though. Technically, you can run a kubernetes cluster on top of OpenStack, so by definition Kubernetes offers a subset of the capabilities of OpenStack. But, it encapsulates the best subset for deploying and managing modern applications. Go look at some demos of ArgoCD, for example. Go look at Cilium and Tetragon for network and workload monitoring. Look at what Grafana and Loki are doing for logging/monitoring/instrumentation.
Because OpenStack lets you deploy nearly anything (and believe me, I was slinging OVAs for anything back in the day) you will never get to that level of standardization of workloads that allows you to do those kind of things. By limiting what the platform can do, you can build really robust tooling around the things you need to do.
A+ is for help desk type folks. I wouldn’t really see that as relevant for a developer with 8 years of experience. I would assume you got it early in your career and still list it for whatever reason.
Can you easily switch drives in your system? I’ll often do that on my computer because little m.2 SSDs are so darn cheap now. It’s easier and cheaper to pick up a little 64GB drive for one off projects than it is to do a proper backup and restore.
Also, I’d just go with Tumbleweed. I don’t distro hop like I used to, but that’s because as everyone else is saying, most of the distros have gotten really good. Most of the time, my little projects are trying out specific features of a different distros. So I’ll just pop a new drive in, test drive it, then either switch back or not.
Also, all of us have done things because we didn’t know better. The only dumb thing to do here is to not learn how to fix this. Try and fail, so next time you know how it works and can do better.
Unless it was encrypted, it prob doesn’t matter. The partition table is just the road map that points to the houses (files). A tool like FTK or PhotoRec goes byte by byte to find the files and figure out what they are. You won’t have file names, but the data might still be there.