Unless I’m missing something, you can do this fairly simply already. I have a post-install script I run on all of my machines which sets up all network shares and runs ‘apt install whole bunch of packages’ to get things into a ready-to-roll state.

Just drop the anit-cheat requirement and let is handle cheating directly, with vote-to-kick, like we did back in the day.

Fair, unfortunately it was a work machine that i needed operational again asap.

Luckily i image my machine monthly, so it was fairly straightforward to roll back.

Generally yes. My exception was the time i accidentally nuked python in it’s entirety…

If it helps, 80% of the work i do when wearing my sysadmin hat is just ensuring that all of our systems are communicating properly.

I did like one semester of computer science, does that count?

Honestly I just google shit until I understand it. Linux has great documention, and where it fails you can just read the source code.

smartmontools has some good functionality for interfacing with SMART via usb bridges that do not provide native functionality.

This is actually how I do things when working on remote machines. I have far too many monitors, so dedicating on of them to a handful of btop/nvtop terminals works pretty well.

I admit that it’s a less than perfect setup though, and a single program which could handle the remote connections internally and display an aggregate would be nice.

I would argue that the modern smartphone is different, but by no means better. Between the locked down operating systems and the lack of a physical keyboard they are great for consuming media through approved channels, but basically useless if you want to get any work done with them.