If you are ok with Ubuntu in general, excluding the AI part, go upstream and get Debian. It's primarily mandate is stability which, to me at least, means no AI integration from the standard install.

While I definitely prefer that the distribution have no AI code, most important for me is that the OS not have mandatory AI integration. I don't want my boxes to EVER reach out to some LLM datacenter.

I think you cannot find any because the Linux kernel itself has AI assisted development happening. Distros that use the kernel then cannot say "No AI."

Edit: Gentoo and NetBSD specifically do not allow AI generated code.

Good point!

Hop on Arch.

Doesn't mention the single criterion I need to choose a distro: whether or not it mandates inclusion of AIslop in the OS.

What do you mean by "install aur"?

What are you trying to do, specifically? And why? AUR is a collection of third party package build scripts to install software. You don't download the entire thing on any system.

No

I couldn't guess why, but a dd'ed image boots fine, but Ventoy failed again. Who knows - seems to be working for now.

Thanks for the tip.

No, but I did verify the hash on the downloaded iso. I'll try without Ventoy.

Did you try installing without ventoy?

Sometimes ventoy causes issues. Although every time I've had an issue I thought was a Ventoy issue it had turned out to lie somewhere else, but it's important to isolate variables.

Try posting the kernel panic messages, they should give an idea about the failure.

Proxmox has its own custom kernel, it may be something in the new 7 branch as opposed to the conservative 6 branch that Debian uses.

99% of the time it will be some driver that you don’t really need and can disable.

My roommate came to my aid and I tested my mic on his PC - nothing. Then his headset on my PC - it worked. So my USB adapter is still functional, therefore I think the cable is broken. Luckily it's removable, so I ordered a replacement and hope this will be that. Either way, certrainly a hardware issue.

does your library have computers you can test the headset? Keep in mind the headset is a seperate speaker and microphone. The microphone can die with the speakers being fine. They usually do not die at the same time.

What about a friends computer? Is it usb or 3.5mm jack? I have a headset that has a 3.5 that plugs in to an adapter for usb. If similar is there a way to test just with 3.5 jack? Maybe an old phone/walkman/cdplayer/boombox or something. I know im showing my age here. thought about it and those devices wont help you test your mic but an old recorder might work.

Is there any internet café's/libraries near you, they might have what you need. It's worth a try but the more I think about it, since you have audio it's most likely a connection issue in the mic area. Might be able to find a repair shop that could open her up and maybe fix it.

It's wired. Sadly the only PC/headset I've got access to 🥲

And for the cord, I don't expect it to be broken since it can still relay audio perfectly, which isn't a guarantee, but a girl can hope xD

Very well could be hardware. Another test comes to mind.

Try a different computer with the headset to rule out headset hardware or computer hardware. Or a different headset with same computer. That is if you have access to either.

Curious, is it wired or BT? If BT try forgetting the device and paring again. If wired could have the cord been damaged?

No changes to the mics behaviour, sadly. how would you interpret this? I think it makes an hardware issue more likely, but it doesn't make sense to me, that it suddenly would start behaving so weirdly. :/

Maybe try a live usb of a distro to rule out hardware problems.

One thing I like about bind mounts is that there is always a backup directory in the location, so if the USB isn’t plugged in, accidentally saved files don’t just fall into the void. But I don’t remember if that was the reason.

So, if you have a symlink, what will happen is that trying to save to a path that passes through the symlink will fail, because the program trying to save will fail to access the original path (assuming your above directory structure; /mount/external will exist, but /mount/external/realfolder will not, as realfolder is on your USB drive and won't exist when the media isn't mounted). With most programs, they'll warn you that they couldn't write the file (and in fact, that the directory isn't there). From their standpoint, the path is invalid. You won't typically just save a file and have it vanish.

I guess you could theoretically have something like a script that writes a file data and fails silently if the path doesn't exist. I do think that it might get confusing, to have some files written to the bind mount point in the user directory

I mean, the OS isn't going to merge them when you do the bind mount or anything. You're going to have one directory structure on your removable media that contains some files, and when it's inserted and the bind mount is in place, that's what you'll see, and a second directory structure inside the bind mount that will have different data. Like, if whatever is writing this is something that you control, I think I might set it up to explicitly write somewhere else. Or just create a /mount/external/realfolder directory on the /mount filesystem and give the user write permission to /mount/external/realfolder which will have the same effect, with some data going to a the removable media and some to the directory structure where the mountpoint lives if the media isn't present (just that the files will be written to wherever /mount lives, which may not be the same filesystem as /home/user/; I don't know if that matters for your use case).

But if you do feel that you want to set up a bind mount, then yeah, I'd look at the other comment I have in response to your comment here, the one talking about systemd-udev.

Followup: OP, based on your post update, you do indeed mean bind mounts. Okay.

As I said above, what I would probably do myself for most cases is to just use a symlink, not a bind mount. That's easy, doesn't require futzing around with the system, and in most cases probably does what you want, whereas a bind mount may not (e.g. if you have a filesystem indexer or backup system, they're not going to back the stuff up or index it twice).

That'd be something like:

$ ln -s /mount/external/realfolder /home/user/folder

That does mean that /home/user/folder will still be visible when you don't have the media inserted, though it'll just be a dangling symlink.

If you definitely do want to do it with bind mounts...hmm. It looks like there are some additional hurdles.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/799166/linux-auto-mounting-usb-with-udev

According to a comment there, it looks like systemd-udev shouldn't run a mount command directly, as it runs commands in a private namespace; it should use systemd-mount --no-block, which will ask systemd to set this up. You could probably write a bash script that runs a series of commands, including the systemd-mount command. It may be a bit involved for a linux4noobs solution, and I can't give an off-the-cuff answer from personal experience, but I'd guess that it may very well be technically possible, and that's probably what I'd be looking into if I were determined to specifically to use bind mounts.

I think systemctl might be a way because I have read that things are dependent on other things but beyond that I don't know how to organize it.

Thunar file manager has volman. You can use it to manually unmount, including binds, but I'm not sure how to trigger it to know about them automatically. It's an extra step because it has to read the rest of the fstab file to find any dependencies and I don't know why it would do that.

I updated the OP to show my fstab

Thanks, I am OK with issuing a command before physically unplugging the device. I was just finding too many uses of the word "mount" because it's a verb, a command and a noun in this situation lol. I added my fstab to the top so you can see that I am actually using a bind mount.

I investigated symlinks as an alternative and for some reason decided against them. One thing I like about bind mounts is that there is always a backup directory in the location, so if the USB isn't plugged in, accidentally saved files don't just fall into the void. But I don't remember if that was the reason.

I could write some kind of script but I thought it would make more sense to see if something had already been developed because usually in Linux, it has been.