As @BCsven mentioned, the talk about stable distributions is not right at all.
Also, the commands you gave in “secure directories and dotfiles” are not doing anything. sudo chmod 755 ~/.bashrc doesn’t change the ownership of the file: it’s still owned by you. So setting the permissions 755 just makes it writeable by…you. You will still be able to modify it without sudo.
If you want to make your dotfile require root access to change, you would need to augment the chmod with a sudo chown root ~/.bashrc
OnlyOffice is the only one that I’ve used that has a good looking UI, works out of the box and very good compatibility (across Microsoft and other document standards). Install is just one flatpak away. Highly recommend.
Stable not being secure is not correct. if you take a Stable LTS OS it has a guaranteed support cycle for patching security issues. Stable does not mean no updates, you will still get daily/weekly package updates for bug fixes and enhancements, as well as kernel fixes. In the case of a kernel up revision on rolling release fixing a major flaw, you also have to realize new software means new bugs and new vulnerabilities ( that are yet unknown ) Also if you worry about CVE stuff try SUSE or OpenSUSE’s zypper it has various command parameters to search and list patches, suggested security patches and will show a full list of what patches are available for your system, which ones are critical, recommended, not needed, etc with CVE numbers.
Good point about “no new security issues”. But new issues mostly also mean zero days so this is very less likely that old bugs that didnt get a CVE. But I dont know the details, what bugs Debian backports always, I just assume its not all.
I’m assuming VPNs are not really suited to be run as flatpak apps because of system permissions? And it probably won’t work from inside Distrobox/Toolbox container either.
Here’s another vote for EndeavourOS if you need it. I run BTRFS and timeshift-autosnap, but I’ve never needed to use it. Like the other poster said, I’ve had minor annoyances and brief package conflicts, but nothing critical has ever gone awry.
As a complete noob who installed Mint about two weeks ago, I have Thoughts™. This is a good start, I think., and I’m really glad to see it, but it still makes some assumptions and misses a couple of things I came across that I think would be helpful.
I’ll try to find some time tomorrow to pull together some edits and suggestions to share, rather than a bunch of comments here.
I would NOT say it has been on decline. It's pretty good for its target. There also hasn't been any regressions I can see except for the obvious Nautilus. (I use MATE, but mostly because of its looks)
As a kid I had windows 98 (and later xp) dual booted with debian and at some point some version of suse. This was ~20 years ago
Well I used it just fine and I knew a bout the mysterious “root” and “sudo” that my dad would use but I was just playing some games and maybe using the web browser.
Using the GUI I never learned Linux and it wasn’t until a few years ago that I started using Linux again, and it was only because I wouldn’t be able to continue using Windows 7 anymore.
So I don’t have any experience with teaching Linux and especially not to kids, but I think kids are actually really good at learning stuff if they need too, so give them a PC and the tools to figure things out, if they want to use it they’ve got to learn, and don’t give them other options where they don’t have to learn anything.
If you like xfce, I think that kde is more similar to it than gnome. So I would recommend giving kde a try too.
An easy way to test out both is to just use a live image booted from a USB. You could always install them to your everyday PC but then you have a lot more packages installed and I personally would rather keep my installed packages to a minimum. If you can’t do a live cd because your os doesn’t provide one then I would try a vm or a different drive that you can boot into.
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