If hiking and cycling interest you, have you considered mountain biking? Do you live in an area where trying out mtb might be a possibility?
It’s difficult to see from the picture provide what you might mean by “kinda open”. Can you provide a picture or may be an example of what is fastened to the valve body opposite the pipe? If you can’t, is what’s depicted in this link what you see? https://www.mcmaster.com/mvC/Library/20210709/7CBF13E4/4627K333_Medium-Pressure Iron Pipe Fitting.PDF
Is that a plug i see there on the end? Have you considered removing it and opening the valve a little to see what comes out?
The future is now, depending on where you live. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-51321661
How did you go about installing the other two packages from git? Do you know what directory they were first cloned to? Did you build from source or run an executable like an appimage? Did any of these actions occur prior to the install of masterpdfeditor?
You can perform the bios update via bootable media. Here are the readme and iso links.
I can’t help you with the recovery media, but a couple of the problems you describe were resolved with driver and firmware updates that are still available from the oem.