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.
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.
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.
I recently worked on a system that had the TERM variable botched and filtered and no nano, just vim. It was all hell. The escape sequences in vim wouldn’t work. I ended up suspendig it with ctrl+z, killing it, then editing the config with fucking ed and sed. That hoster sucks.
It’s because you don’t want to reinvent the wheel all the time. It sucks doing it. Lots of effort. It’s much better to build on existing stuff and maybe improve it for your needs.