Few years ago I had a collection of maybe fifteen old disks, which I wanted to get rid of, by means of recycling. First I wanted to check the content and then format all so I put them in an external enclosure. It turned out that some disks were unusable. A closer inspection showed that these were all a certain brand and type (Forgot whether it was Seagate or Maxtor or WD). These disks would probably still do fine in a desktop or server computer (Which I no longer had at home) but not with the external enclosure. Perhaps your enclosure is the bottleneck here as well.
TIL that Snapchat is an app used in 2024 without E2EE, Wikipedia article on Snapchat :
Encryption
In January 2018, Snapchat introduced the use of end-to-end encryption in the application but only for snaps (pictures and video), according to a Snapchat security engineer presenting at the January 2019 Real World Crypto Conference.[138][139][140] As of the January 2019 conference Snapchat had plans to introduce end-to-end encryption for text messages and group chats in the future.[141]
Arch Linux, rolling Linux distribution, would give you the newest stable software, with probably new application features, but you can use distrobox, podman-toolbox, VirtualBox, KVM (QEMU) or a live Linux cd image to play with Arch Linux every now and then, without having to install it :)
If you a home user with your computer or laptop inside a LAN you would not really need a firewall, unless you start to use applications which expose its ports to 0.0.0.0 rather than 127.0.0.1 (I believe Redis server software did this a few years ago) and do not trust other users or devices (smart home devices, phones, tablets, modems, switches and so on) inside your LAN.
If you are running a server with just a few services, for example ssh, smtp, https, some hosting company people I knew argue that no firewall is needed. I am not sure, my knowledge is lacking.
Application firewalls, watching also outgoing traffic :
If you compare Linux with some other Operating System you will see that on Linux for years an application firewall was non existing. But there is a choice now : opensnitch This can be useful if you run desktop applications that you do not fully trust, or want more control.
This suggests that if you can build the ROS 1 from source, you have Flatpak and Snap as option, and maybe also AppImage.
Besides that there is also Linux KVM (QEMU) which may perform better than VirtualBox. Cannot find a good page for Ubuntu on it, but here’s the KVM entry of the excellent Arch Linux wiki wiki.archlinux.org/title/KVM
Ubuntu uses LTS with five year support, which is why they like to keep a lot of software versions back. Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu I think. PPA is something you can add to Ubuntu or Ubuntu based Linux distributions to have newer or specific software repositories as extra on your system. Here’s a guide on PPA : itsfoss.com/ppa-guide/
Yes. I know Manjaro got bad press several times, about their SSL cert and about firing their treasurer but as a Linux distribution Manjaro is pretty decent for the average user, in my opinion.
The Snapchat has a word-filter suggestion makes most sense. But then again Cloudflare is very popular on the Internet as the cheap and well-known MITM anti-DDOS tool.
I haven’t read much about i2p, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the government has their paws in there too.
You will have to trust something if you want to communicate, there’s also GNUnet, ZeroNet, DeltaChat, and probably a lot more.