* I also typically back up my `/etc` in an archive, separately from my off-line backup media of the whole system (which I don't always make actually). I often find I need to restore settings of some service or app from files I had there.
* Ditto for `/root`. While I try to not put much in the root home directory, the few things I put there useful for root on the new system as well (e.g. `.vimrc`...)

Finally, while using a distribution and over the months/years I use it, I try to log - in words - significant changes to it in an "administrator's journal" (like a Captain's log in Star Trek if you will :-P ). I put it in /var/log/admin-journal . I always back that up, especially since, on the new system, I often follow steps I had logged there (e.g. "2019-01-05\nSet up a wheel group to be able to su without password, via /etc/passed and /etc/pam.d/su ; placed alice and bob in the wheel group")

First, thanks for the links. However, none of them is what I'm really after, even if some of them may provide some pieces of what I'm after. I'm looking for a periodic overview of the state of the project, and none of the links has it. In particular, none of them talks about what has been achieved, what are efforts being focused on, what is expected to happen, what are significant challenges facing the project in the near future etc.

Now, about those links...

• Popularity contest is cute, but it's a voluntary package installed by a not-so-large fraction of the user-base. Do you have credible statistical analysis suggesting a known ratio between the values there and the actual active user-base? I'm guessing "no", considering the comment at the bottom.

• The financial report:

  • It is from 2020; 15 months have passed since.

  • It shows very little activity involving money, and very limited income. There's nothing wrong with that, and no reason to over-capitalize things, but - if that's the case, then the non-financial activity report, of what volunteers are doing, is even more important.

  • There's no budgeted-vs-actual on anything, although given how only few activities are mentioned, the lack of this information is not that terrible.

• The lists of people do not show who is currently active, except for 3 people + board of trustees. More importantly, it doesn't show who-does-what.

• What are the distrowatch figures supposed to represent?  (... looks into it...) The rating value is an arbitrary number reviewers give a distribution, without even any guideline on how to rate; and we know nothing about the distribution of DW reviewers.

You don't owe me anything, I'm just a lowly user who works on other FOSS, but FWIW I find this lacking.

> We are all adults

Waiting for this part to be revised once some under-18 users complain (which they should)...

It's a fair enough reply to tell me to report this upstream. But - where exactly do I report this? reportbug? For which package?

For other readers of this thread: Note you may have other packages which install firewall rules (via nft or iptables-legacy or otherwise), which would conflict with the nft tables you want to load.

Actually, I'd say that it's kind of a problem that nft is highly visible, on the one hand, via /etc/nftables.conf; and the nftables is installed on account of network-manager (assuming you've installed that), but on the other hand - there is no associated service you could even query for status. Nor do you get any indication about how things might conflict with its use.

Which distribution strives for simplicity? Debian? Don't know how you figure that, considering the immense number of packages in the main repository.

Also, the user gets the tasksel dialog. In that dialog s/he is offered to select multiple items. There is no cue - visual, auditory, textual - that there's any problem with selecting multiple items. If doing so is considered unreasonable, there would have been radio buttons for the different desktop environments. So, that's one argument for reasonableness.

The other argument is that the person installing does not know which desktop environment the user will prefer. And - it could be more than one user, each with a different preference (e.g. one who is accustomed to Lubuntu with LXQt, and another that's accustomed to Mint with Cinnamon). That's a second argument why it is reasonable to select multiple DEs.

A final reason for this selection is wanting to make available apps originating in the different DEs to users of all DEs.

The user should not be offered any of these choices. Just a "Cancel" button in addition to "Ok". Or, as suggested in this post - no dialog at all, and just a login into the default window manager.

It is not reasonable to force a first-time user to make a selection in a dialog they do not expect, between items they don't recognize, without an option to get cold feet and say "cancel".

Are you sure that the "culprit" here is lxqt upstream? More specifically, are you saying that I shouldn't even reportbug against the lxqt package?

@Head_on_a_Stick can you be a little more explicit? fsmithred posted a link only because he(?) made a single reply on two threads. With your link - I'm not sure what exactly you're telling me, plus it's off-site.

Actually, I couldn't since I already set the timezone.

... however, after having set it - it's still not a symlink, it's a plain text file. It now contains Asia/Jerusalem.

That's not the point of this report. The point is that there's a bug with the distribution (or one of the packages) which causes this to happen. It should be fixed _in the distribution_; I can take care of my own system.