In Firefox, I don’t remember having something similar. That was like 5+ years ago, I believe profiles were there, but perhaps less easy to use.

The profiles feature in Firefox haa been there for a long, long time—more than a decade, and possibly longer than Chrome has existed—but not many people read the documentation to find the command-line switch to evoke the selector, and they’ve never been terribly easy to find from inside the GUI.

Well, it often feels like every “Linux security issue” flagged in the tech press is a privilege escalation, but I admit that I haven’t sat down and done the math.

Exactly. It’s Yet Another Privilege Escalation Vulnerability. Unless you’re dealing with a multiuser machine, the attacker first needs to use some other vuln to get into an unprivileged account. Without that additional vulnerability, this exploit is useless.

We don’t talk about 1997. It might hear. 😱

As a long-time Gentoo user, I can tell you that it’s perfectlly capable of producing both a useful gaming rig and a useful server, provided you have some idea of what you want to end up with.

Proprietary nvidia drivers should be straightforward enough: emerge nvidia-drivers and blacklist the nouveau module (or compile a custom kernel that doesn’t contain it). You’ll probably want to read what the Gentoo wiki has to say about Steam.

Good luck.

If using OpenRC is all it tales to be on the dark side, then I’ve been there since before it was cool.

It has better specs than the 2008 laptop I retired last year (I was running Gentoo on that, but I don’t entirely recommend that unless you’re experienced with Gentoo and know what kind of setup to go with). Anyway, SNES emulation is less demanding than running a modern web browser, so your little beastie should be fine for that.

Gentoo, across multiple machines. Started there, stayed there. Yes, it’s a bear to install, but once you’ve got everything sorted out, it’s rock-solid.