before you change anything it would be good to use dd and save the whole drive to a bigger drive or maybe compress it with gzip while using dd to save it to a slightly smaller one. That takes a very long time, but gives you the ability to start over with your recovery. Only do that if it’s worth to wait several hours.
photorec can also recover some files by looking at the raw data still there, if all else fails.
I put a piece of garlic from the supermarket into the soil of a flower pot on my balcony to try and deter aphids. It grew 30cm long leafes and I think it will make it thru the winter. I hope it won’t use up all the good stuff in the soil and kill the actual flowers.
The best way used to be XPRA. You can also tunnel it thru SSH, but not necessary in a trusted LAN. XPRA is like a per application display proxy that keeps an app running even if the connection is interrupted and enables reconnects as well as transfers of Xclient windows to other Xservers, i.e. you can transfer the remote window from your notebook to your workstation Xserver whithout having to restart the app.
As long as you do not use root privileges (indicated by sudo or that password promt pkexec) you cannot destroy the system in a way that can’t be fixed by deleting a few files in the users home directory.
Is conky still a thing? I used it for that when I used an exclusively passive cooled PC a few years ago. You were able to easily create bar graphs in a config file and even include output of commands.
I’m pretty sure it’s because less people use it. They make fun of Gentoo taking longer to compile stuff on install/update, but that’s pretty fast nowadays. What really takes up time is making all the choices. I remember hours of selecting obscure kernel options and choosing use flags “what is ncurses? Do i need ncurses? What is sdl? Do i need sdl? …” I mostly use Ubuntu now, because I got no more time for that.