Agreed. I’ve learned most of what I know about computers by fixing broken stuff. Like you, my first serious daily driver was Manjaro. And after dealing with broken systems time and time again, I’m tired, boss. My daily driver for the last 2 years has been Mint and I love it to death for how stable and functional it is. But the lessons I learned along the way with other distros have been invaluable.

Does the device show up if you open Gparted? Maybe it needs to be formatted. Though I guess it’d still show up with ‘lsusb’ even if it needed formatting.

I wanna say fwupd/lvfs manages firmware updates on Arch (and lots of other distros) these days.

You may be able to roll back the latest firmware update with fwupdmgr. What’s the output of fwupdmgr get-devices in your terminal? Also, what is the make/model of the ethernet port that is now on the fritz? You can search for it on the website here: https://fwupd.org/ in the “search for firmware” bar at the top, then you may be able to install the old version with fwupdmgr.

I’m not familiar with EndeavourOS, but I’ll ask a few questions to get the troubleshooting process started:

With the ethernet cable plugged in, can you access your local router config page (if you have one)? e.g.: 192.168.1.1. If not, what happens when you ping the router’s address in the terminal?

If you’re able to successfully ping/access your router, can you ping a well-known IP address such as 8.8.8.8 (google DNS) or 1.1.1.1 (cloudflare DNS)?

Jokingly: “Linux is free if your time is worthless”

Though this tongue-in-cheek tagline takes the “free as in free beer” misinterpretation of the term “free software”, I’ve always found it a fun way to describe the time investment you’ll need to make if you’ve spent your whole life using Windows before making the switch.

I’m in a similar boat to you; whether the blobs constitute a security threat seems to still be up in the air. I read through the issue thread on github a few months back and it seemed the vast majority of the blobs were built by scripts contained in the repository, but some weren’t documented well, leading to uncertainty.

The comment by Long0x0 on Aug 05 lists a lot of the blob files.

There’s no way to srsly prevent a full-bloat browser from messing with its environment.

Can you elaborate on this? I’m curious as to what manner a browser like Firefox could be exploited in order to affect its environment outside of something like a sandbox escape.

and connect to it with an iPad that has a Jellyfin client installed?

In my experience, you don’t even need the dedicated Jellyfin client. Just opening it up in a web browser works out of the box, so that’s potentially one less thing to download/install/manage for the clients.

That said, I’ve never tried to access Jellyfin from an iPad/iPhone/Mac so it might not be as seamless as my experiences on Android/Linux based devices. But I imagine they’d be fine; just test it out before you hit the road.