Sickday

I can’t remember how I rescued it now but managed to get it back without a reinstall

You could’ve booted into a previous generation where you still had all those things on your system. The glory of atomic distros :)

I did for some time. There’s beauty in the simplicity and flexibility of Alpine, plus BusyBox is great once you understand all the weird quirks between it and coreutils. As unpopular as it might be, I actually really like OpenRC. Alpine feels pretty close to BSD if you’re familiar with that family of operating systems. These days I use it for just about all my servers save for a few Nix boxes.

If you decide to explore this route, here are a couple tools I found useful at the start:

• Conty - A single executable that launches applications in a standalone Linux Container
• x11docker - Run GUI apps and desktop environments in docker and podman containers.

Also might behoove you to check out Alpine community’s documentation on chroots in case you need specific software that isn’t available otherwise.

Since no one answered you here, I’ll say distrochooser.de isn’t bad at all. For the new linux user who is comfortable enough trying new things, I think it’s perfect. It does lose its usefulness if you’ve already tried all of the options it offers, but at that point you probably don’t need distrochooser anyway.

The Asahi Linux project provides a Fedora-based experience for people using Apple Silicon. It works well for the most part but there are features that are still being developed.

As for Windows, I don’t know of any methods to get Windows running outside of macOS, but many people utilize Parallels for Windows apps or the desktop experience.