Ok. Restarting with a fresh Debian install. Let's see if this official wiki "instructions" are better than the last....
🙏
@MightyBigCar Me thinks it's secretly a game... like those escape rooms where you have to solve obvious puzzles to escape. But... I'm alone and trapped!
@Averly seriously! There should be an envelope you can rip open to get the Critical Clue Shortcut that lets you solve the mystery. Even if it is something like "sorry, you can't do that on Fedora 28, so everybody dies", it would save a lot of hassles and angst.