Copy-n-paste has always required a cooperative implementation.

In X11, it requires that the application in question support selections in a way that conforms to the window manager conventions, which requires handling X11 atoms in a conformant way so that the selected text can be transferred to the target application (i.e. where the paste happens). All of this requires a significant amount of code not just in the target application, but in the source application, and would not be possible if the authors decided to be lazy and simply not implement it. (It's not part of the core X11 protocol, btw, it's part of the window manager conventions which strictly speaking is optional, though not implementing it is regarded as highly antisocial.)

I'm no fan of wayland either, but blaming the failure of cut-n-paste on wayland is not really fair because it requires all 3 parties to be involved: the display manager/compositor/whatever, the source application, and the target application. A failure on the part of any one party means that cut-n-paste won't work.  So the blame could equally go to the authors of either application too.

Funny acronyms:

And for you math geeks out there:

In firefox, ctrl-shift-I to open web developer tools, click on the select arrow (upper left) to select an element, select the piece of text containing the offending character, then on the right panel select "fonts" to see the fonts used to render that bit of text.

I'm not sure if the underlying problem is actually solved; this particular character ought to be in many of the fonts we recommended that you should install, so I'm not sure why it only shows up when a Korean font is installed. I suspect there's still something fishy with your font config; it shouldn't need a Korean font to be able to find a suitable glyph for this character, since you've already installed many fonts that, ostensibly, should already include it.

Yeah, I suspect it's a problem with the OP's font configuration, or something isn't properly installed that's causing it to revert to fonts that don't contain the required characters.

Do you know exactly what those offending characters are?  Any chance you could copy-n-paste them here somehow?  Just wondering if they are some obscure characters that most fonts wouldn't have.

Note that after installing new fonts they may not get picked up immediately. You may need to log out and log in again, or restart your display server, before the new fonts will get picked up. Maybe try that?

If that still doesn't work, it might be a problem with font configuration, i.e., the fonts are installed but the application for whatever reason is defaulting to an old font that doesn't have the needed characters.

I wonder if the best way to solve this is a way of reading systemd unit files and auto-generating the equivalent rc scripts. Of course, some things may not be achievable (features that are systemd-only), but at least this would take care of the majority of cases and leave a much smaller set of packages that need manual adaptation to be systemd-free.

Awesome, me too!  I actually left the MS world behind in the early days of Windows '97. Back when protected mode was still a thing people talked about, and the option of switching to DOS mode stlll existed (i.e., not just Command Prompt, but the actual, real DOS mode in non-protected mode).  I hated Windows 3.1, and '95 and '97 did not impress me either -- I always felt they did not deliver on their promise: protected mode was supposed to solve the problem of programs stepping over each other that often happened in the DOS world; in exchange for restricted access to system resources, you were supposed to reap the benefit of having a true multitasking system. But the implementation was disappointing, to say the least.  There were all sorts of bugs and loopholes and performance problems, plus your typical MS shove-it-down-your-throat junk that left a bad taste in my mouth.

Upon a friend's recommendation, I started looking into Linux, and chose Debian as the most flexible option that let me configure my system the way I wanted.  This was back in the days before debian-installer and apt-get; I had to download a CD image of the base system and then individually download .deb packages (figuring out the dependencies myself based on information from debian.org) and install them by hand with dpkg.  Initially I had dual boot, but it wasn't long before I ditched dual boot completely and left the Windows world forever.  I've never looked back since.

I've never bought into the "desktop metaphor". IMNSHO it's a poor way of looking at computing. One unique characteristic of humanity is language -- not just isolated words but grammar and structure that conveys complex, abstract thought beyond just "me hungry, me wanna eat, me angry, me beat you up". To express computation, language is the ideal vehicle. Thus, the best way to communicate with the computer is via language -- with grammar, syntax, and intent, like what you get at the shell prompt.  The "desktop metaphor" pushed by MS reduces human-computer interaction back into the stone age of point-and-grunt, "me hungry, me want browser, me move this here, me push this there". It reduces the powerful abstractions of language back to the inferior metaphor of moving physical objects around.  (Plus, most people's desks tend to get messy over time from the clutter of junk piling up on it -- is that the way you want to be using your machine? Messy, inaccurate, accumulates junk over time -- like Windows tends to do. Now you know why.)

My first contact with the Posix world was in university where we had a SunOS server serving X terminals running twm; my early Debian installs all used twm, later ctwm.  It was one step above MS's "desktop metaphor", but still not ideal.  Eventually, after many years, I gradually moved away from overlapping windows to tiled window managers, and eventually adopted Ratpoison: a mouseless WM completely driven by keyboard.  My productivity shot up by an order of magnitude -- all those hand movements between mouse and keyboard slowed me down in so many ways that I never realized; now that the rodent is finally banished to a secondary role and everything was keyboard-driven, my interaction with the computer is more expressive and much more efficient. No more point-and-grunt, I communicate with the machine with real language -- be it shell, vim (the modal interaction is actually a grammar in disguise), or a full-blown programming language.  These days I only keep the rodent around to interact with primitive UIs like the browser that's still stuck in the stone age of point-and-grunt.

As long as there remains enough people who can think above the level of point-and-grunt, I think we're safe, somebody will always come up with something focused on handing power to the user rather than whoever is trying to assume control over your device.

Probably, though currently I don't feel like it. The system works fine as it is, and I can fix problems as they come along.

Yes, I followed those migration instructions but had to modify some of them, mainly because they were for debian/bookworm(?) but I was already on debian/trixie. There were some conflicts that needed strong-arming with `dpkg --force-depends` to resolve, though it all worked out in the end.  But the process may have caused my system to become a frankenstein mixture of devuan and debian/trixie. In fact, it did, I already ran into a problem recently with libcurl4-dev: I had a 8.x installed from debian/trixie but the devuan version is still at 7.x. That also needed some force-depends strong-arming to work around.

So probably my non-working default wifi settings also has something to do with this, though I found a less extreme solution as described above.

Not sure what you mean by discourse websites; the sites that don't work for me are sites that use things like Chrome-specific ways of doing video/audio via complex JS code. I've no idea how one might work around this dependency.

Also, what I don't expect in my lifetime is the ability to browse online, without any handicap or loss of functionality, with keyboard only, zero mouse use. I don't believe there's a big audience for this even among those who prefer no corporation driven designs.

What's the reason you want to disable ipv6?