Assume anything you can buy has a shelf life and set a yearly reminder on your calendar to copy forward stuff more than five or so years old, if those files are of significant value to you. Or for the documents, print them out—paper has better longevity than any consumer-available electronic storage.

That being said, quality optical discs are probably the best option in terms of price to longevity ratio for the average person right now. Just keep in mind that they are not guaranteed to last forever and do need to be recopied from time to time.

(I have yet to have a DVD fail on me, but I keep them in hard plastic jewel cases in climate-controlled conditions, and I’ve probably just been lucky.)

I prefer Claws Mail. It does what I need it to.

It was a legitimate but extremely rare concern with some early printers, yes (Wikipedia points out a particular early laser model from Xerox, plus an experimental machine from 1959, as printers that have legit caught on fire, but also points out that there is no known report of one of the old industrial-sized line or drum printers ever catching fire from friction despite it being a hypothesized failure mode). Thing is, those printers were, I believe, all obsolete by the time the Linux kernel was written. So the “on fire” error message is not likely to have been congruent with reality for any machine actually running Linux.

We’re talking about a kernel whose user-visible error messages have historically included things like “lp0 on fire” . . .

There’s an old joke from a couple of decades ago about what operating systems would be like if they were airlines:

Linux Airlines

Disgruntled employees of all the other OS airlines decide to start their own airline. They build the planes, ticket counters, and pave the runways themselves. They charge a small fee to cover the cost of printing the ticket, but you can also download and print the ticket yourself. When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of the seat-HOWTO.html. Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plane leaves and arrives on time without a single problem, the in-flight meal is wonderful. You try to tell customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say is, “You had to do what with the seat?”

Gentoo is still very much a “You had to do what with the seat?” distro, while most others have retired that concept to varying degrees, at the cost of the seats being less easy to perform unusual adjustments on.

Assuming that it works out, yes, this might fix the problem. On the other hand, I remember gcj, which kind of quietly vanished after a while, so I prefer to reserve judgement until gcc’s Rust implementation is ready for production use.

You say that as though it’s a bad thing. 😆

One detail about Rust in the kernel that often gets overlooked: the Linux kernel supports arches to which Rust has never been ported. Most of these are marginal (hppa, alpha, m68k—itanium was also on this list), but there are people out there who still use them and may be concerned about their future. As long as Rust remains in device drivers only this isn’t a major issue, but if it penetrates further into the kernel, these arches will have to be desupported.

(Gentoo has a special profile “feature” called “wd40” for these arches, which is how I was aware of their lack of Rust support. It’s interesting to look at the number and types of packages it masks. Lotta python there, and it looks like gnome is effectively a no-go.)