waka

Eh. "The Internet is getting worse!" sounds alot like "New cars suck!", "Politicans keep lying!" and "Everything was better back then!" - some sayings like "The young behave awful!" go back to long before the beginnings of civilisation (probably).

So I wouldn't worry much. Once humans lose interest in something, they move on and the old huts, devices and whatnot slowly erode away. Guess why we are now talking on a federated network - because those big companies started rotting away and the smell slowly starts driving people away.

Just my opinion though. It's still fun to see things crumble.

Leatherman with matching bitset. Bought it on a whim 10 years ago and I use it constantly for lots of things. It wasn't my cheapest purchase, but damn has it gotten me out of a lot of difficult project situations where no proper toolbox was available. I've literally filled and repaired entire server racks with this thing.

I did Gentoo Stage 1 (which was very similiar to what you plan to do) in 2005 with a shitty laptop. 24 hours until I had a working shell compiled. A whole week until I had a graphical desktop working properly. Stupid me didn't have enough and did it again in 2013 with better hardware within just 36 hours to the desktop.

If you seek a challenge that leaves you with angelic patience once you've overcome the never ending rages you'll encounter to push through to the end against all odds, lots of errors, bad documentation, dependencies from hell AND keeping it running, which will inevitably raise your patience muscles strength again and again, then yes, do it. Just accept that at some point, something will break inside you.

There is this IMHO very interesting solution from India that uses edible cutlery products. It's basically a form of hard baked bread in the shape of knives, forks, spoons, plates, bowls, ... . They keep hot and liquid food very well for quite some time, and the forks, knives and spoons remain solid enough to eat perfectly well with. Eventually, they will disintegrate on their own within a few weeks or so if you don't eat them first. All this without the need to cover the surfaces with anything at all, and also made so cheaply that they come very close to most current disposable solutions.