A couple of months ago, I bought an old 27" iMac and installed it with Endeavour OS (an Arch Linux derivative) as its operating system. All has been fine since: Linux doesn't understand how to do the iMac's 5K screen resolution, but has no problem with the hardware otherwise and the 4K resolution I'm currently using is a delight. I've never previously used anything higher than 1980x1200, so 3840x2160 has been a (literally!) eye-opening experience. I'm never going back to 'standard high res' after this, anyway. Short version is, therefore: Apple make gorgeous hardware and an appalling operating system, but at least with Intel Macs, you can have the hardware with a sensible operating system after all!
Unfortunately, just last Thursday I attempted to install ZFS on the PC and although the installation seemed to work fine, rebooting the computer resulted in a 'no boot disk found' error state. I thought perhaps the internal SSD had failed, which would have been an expensive thing to fix... but, booting a live distro from a USB stick, the internal SSD was there, present and correct. Clearly, I had mangled its 'bootability' somehow, however, and rather than faff around with a bazillion possible fixes, I decided to wipe and re-install.
This is surprisingly easy to contemplate doing when, like me, you use an external 4TB SSD as your /home partition: all your documents, program settings and other personalisations are safe on that external drive. Once you re-install a working operating system and all the applications you use, you then edit the /etc/fstab to get the external SSD mounted as your /home folder. One more reboot and your system is back to pretty much the state it was in before you screwed things up!
However, you may have noticed strange statistics coming through on the 'Last Week's Playing' page, and if so, that's the reason why. As part of my recovery efforts, I booted up an old Mac Mini I had sitting in the loft and which I once used as my main PC. It's old copy of Giocoso started sending its statistics to the website as though it were still the current music playing PC, resulting in a weird spike in the number of unplayed recordings in my music collection, amongst other things: its statistics were those from March 2024, the last time the Mac Mini had seen serious use. As soon as I realised what was going on, I sorted it, but it was a silly glitch to have allowed to happen in the first place. Mea culpa!
The iMac 27" now sports a nice, new and hopefully un-screw-up-able copy of Debian 12.5 and all seems fine. The only persistent issue is that a planned release of Semplice Version 2 has had to be delayed (again!) for as long as it takes me to get back to a suitable testing state (there are about 34 virtual machines which need to be re-deployed onto the rebuilt PC, for starters). The release is nevertheless imminent...