Gentoo taught me a lot. I ran hardened gentoo with grsec, pax, and selinux ~20 years ago. That was really a nag. I’m glad for the experience though, I’m never afraid to compile my own kernel now. I just prefer the convenience of debian or fedora based distros now.

When I do a hardware refresh on my self hosted machines(typically over 5 years) I usually wait for a bleeding edge brand new socket, and have to compile the latest kernel for reasonable performance and stability until maintainers backport or the distro moves forward.

Using any tool that vibrate much like a string trimmer will irritate where my spine is pinched and I’ll regret it for months. It makes me feel useless. Fusing 4 discs in my upper back or neck would almost guaranteed make me feel more useless.

I definitely can’t pretend I’m young anymore. It isn’t just pain, and when it is pain it’s not the worst pain. It makes me unable to feel my arm. I had to get an epidural of steroids to get the inflammation down to get feeling back, and I seem to be at least mildly allergic to that .