RE: Battle Scars
It was totally my own damn fault too. I spilled soup on my old laptop, backed up my keys from the thumb drive they were on to cloud storage so I could make a bootable install drive out of it. A friend of mine was kind enough to buy me a replacement laptop, but I installed Ubuntu 18.04 and encrypted the file after pulling it down from cloud storage, then tried to remove some silly game I was never gonna play, which apparently unlike previous versions of Ubuntu is tied to some system-critical process. After rebooting to a non-Plasma shell I could access the file but couldn't decrypt it.
Soooo ... if you run an Ubuntu system and upgrade to the latest LTS version, you're kinda stuck with the silly games that are included even with the lightweight installation.
Yes, Ubuntu is a bit fickle. I use it but only bare minimal with XFCE as a desktop. They also have a tracking extension that tracks everything you do which is ridiculous. I think it's called zietgiest or something close to it..
Do they? I thought I read a while back that they got rid of that stuff as of 16.04?
~furiously scouring the interwebz now~
Check the repository: Zeitgeist or libzeitgeist
Zeitgeist is a service which logs the user activities and events (files opened, websites visited, conversations held with other people, etc) and makes the relevant information available to other applications
Just make sure it's not installed. I used to use just plain Jane Debian just because of that program. Certain desktop environments automatically install it