Sorry for my ignorance but why didn’t they just go to the Arctic, it should be much cheaper and one don’t have to go straight to the Pole, northernmost parts of Canada, Alaska, or Europe would be enough to witness 24-hours sun. I personally was to the north of the Arctic circle and the polar day was lit. And it was as cheap and easy as buy one railway ticket from Moscow.
Basically, I just followed this tutorial for my EndeavourOS installations. It’s as easy as choosing an older entry in GRUB. Fedora offers something similar by default, and I think Tumbleweed does too.
Moreover I’m now playing with Arkane Linux (https://arkanelinux.org/), immutable flavour of Arch, it features another magic with btrfs and rollbacks without snapshots and GRUB
I use Btrfs for my root partition to be able to rollback if something goes wrong after update. XFS: in all other cases, since I hate the lost+found directory on ext4. Although I don’t think there’s any significant difference between ext4 and xfs in performance and reliability.
Actually, I was a biology student at that time and we had summer field practice near the White Sea. It was great, nature and atmosphere were wonderful, except mosquitoes, mosquitoes were everywhere and they were hungry. Though I’ve been to Murmansk later, and the city is decent, I mean, it’s still small, dying, and depressing, but it could be much worse. I was there literally for a day and can’t say much, but they had a very good regional museum and the first nuclear icebreaker is now an interesting museum too.