The problem is that the damage is done. He's proven the game plan works and he's not even that clever. Whoever replaces him will just pick up where he left of end then we're really fucked.
The "secret sauce" of Docker / containers is that they're very good at essentially lying to the contents of the container and making it think it has a whole machine to itself. By that I mean the processes running in a container will write to say /config and be quite content to write to that directory but docker is secretly redirecting that write to somewhere else. Where that "somewhere else" is, is known as a "volume" in docker terminology and you can tell it exactly where you want that volume to be. When you see a command with -vin it, that's a volume map - so if you see something like -v /mnt/some/directory:/config in there - that's telling docker "when this container tries to write to /config, redirect it to /mnt/some/directory instead.
That way you can have 10 containers all thinking they're each writing to their own special /config folder but actually they can all be writing to somewhere unique that you specify. That's how you get the container to read and write to files in specific locations you care about, that you can backup and access. That's how you get persistence.
There's other ways of specifying "volumes", like named volumes and such but don't worry too much about those, the good ol' host path mapping is all you need in 99% of cases.
If you don't specify a volume, docker will create one for you so the data can be written somewhere but do not rely on this - that's how you lose data, because you'll invariably run some docker clean command to recover space and delete an unused unnamed volume that had some important data in it.
It's exactly the same way docker does networking, around port mapping - you can map any port on your host to the port the container cares about. So a container can be listening on port 80 but actually it's being silently redirected by the docker engine to port 8123 on your host using the -p 8123:80 argument.
Now, as for updates - once you've got your volumes mapped (and the number and location of them will depend on the container itself - but they're usually very well documented), the application running in the container will be writing whatever persistence data it needs to those folders. To update the application, you just need to pull a newer version of the docker container, then stop the old one and start it again - it'll start up using the "new" container. How well updates work really depends on the application itself at this point, it's not really something docker has any control over but the same would be if you were running via LXC or apt-get or whatever - the application will start up, read the files and hopefully handle whatever migrations and updates it needs to do.
It's worth knowing that with docker containers, they usually have labels and tags that let you specify a specific version if you don't want it updating. The default is an implied :latest tag but for something like postgress which has a slightly more involved update process you will want to use a specific tag like postgres:14.3 or whatever.
Why are you excited at the prospect of less competition in the gaming space?
You don't have to like Microsoft at all, don't buy their stuff, but they're still a major competitor to Sony, Nintendo and Valve - and losing them would do more harm than good. Losing any of them would.
Edit: seems a lot of folks miss the point, I'm not defending Microsoft's practices, I'm saying having more competition is better.
Sony and Nintendo are not angels either. Even valve has it's bad points. You can by all means pick a side but less competition is always worse.
I know it's not helpful or what you're asking for but honestly, just learn docker and all of these kinds of problems just go away.
Once you learn to spin up one docker container, you can spin up nearly any of them (there's a couple of extra steps if you need GPU acceleration, things like that).
You'll be kicking yourself that you didn't hadn't the jump earlier. Sounds like you're already using Linux too, so it's really not that big a leap.
It's already possible to make the printer work entirely offline but even if by some stroke they were able to disable them anyway, I'd sell it in a heartbeat.
I'm infuriated by this change, but I'm also frustrated because they really are very good printers. There's a reason so many people bought them and they became so popular, they are very very good.
But this change is utter bullshit, I won't be upgrading my firmware any time soon.
Am I correct in saying that you're used to languages that aren't type safe? Or at least not as strict about it.
Everything you're describing sounds more like you're struggling with type safety in general and I wouldn't say any of those packages are at fault, in fact I'd even go further and say they're like that by design.
The reason you don't actually want any of those separate packages to be more interoperable out of the box is because that would couple them together. That would mean dependencies on those packages, it would mean if it wanted to use something else then you'd be a bit stuck.
Like I'd question using a uuid as a salt, like it's fine and I get why they're suggesting it, but you can use anything as a salt so why couple yourself to a specific uuid library? Why couple yourself to uuids at all.
Side note: I'm guessing the reason the crate expects you to supply your own salt is because you need to also store the salt next to the password hash, if it generated the salt for you there's a chance you might ignore the salt and suddenly not be able to validate passwords.
Anyway....
The only way you could make these separate packages work dramatically together and without coupling them would be to use a universal type - probably a byte array - and at that point you lose most of the benefits of a strong type system. What are currently compile errors become runtime errors, which are much worse and harder to diagnose.
My suggestion to you would be to reframe your thinking a little, think less about how you can make different crates speak to each other and more about how you convert from one type to another - once you crack that, all of these integration problems will go away.
I don't know why LTT are somehow the bad guys in this, they weren't the only ones to realise that the extension messed with their affiliate links and it's not like it's a thing to publicly shout about every dropped sponsor.
I bet LTT has dropped plenty of sponsors without making a big public deal about it.
Russia still has elections, the US will just play the same charade.