Debian or Linux Mint

Arch would actually stand a chance.

Slightly off-topic, but that is some interesting blogging platform.

Is this real?

Snapshots are subvolumes.

Is it really open source if it depends on proprietary service?

You might still have bluetooth to fix…

You’re saying it like they have a choice.

Besides, stuff like this should not be constrained by the boundaries of nationalities.

They would never!

Perhaps if you’re just trying out and experimenting, you shouldn’t use your main system. Try it in a VM, or even better, a spare computer. Then whatever stuff that you like, you trickle down to your main system.

In the case of DEs, I don’t like having multiple ones in my system, but only because I like my systen lean. So if I want to try out a DE, I’d just set it up on a test system, usually from scratch.

So far, I’m liking KDE the most, but for something more lightweight, I’d go with XFCE or MATE.

To answer your original question: Theoretically, it could affect your security as each piece of software could have vulnerabilities. In practice, however, it’s negligible, and if there’s anything major, it would usually get addressed quickly.

Last but not least: When you’re just starting out, you wouldn’t want to be focusing too much on security. Following the general guidelines should suffice for most case. Just focus first on getting all the functionalities you need. Security usually means restricting access, including to yourself, that means doing it too much could make things not function properly. Securing things prematurely (i.e. before you get things working) could only frustrate you, speaking from experience.

I’m definitely all for Ukraine winning, but this is bullshit, basically the red scare all over again (but for tech).

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

You’re saying that, and yet even Leah Rowe is sick of that.

Also, try not to take my words out of context. We’re talking specifically about the project mentioned in the article. Tell me, what value has canoeboot and GNU boot provides?

Coming from a (pragmatic) fan of GNU projects.

They’re a bunch of idealists that are detached from reality. Kinda reminds me of myself back when I was still in college.

As a coreboot user, I’m laughing as well.

To me, this highlights the fallacy (and arguably hypocricy) of their thesis.

You seem to be comparing a distro release to a new game release. It’s not. A distro is not always exciting because their top priority is having a working system. This means dealing with all the boring stuff.

It feels like there’s a shortage of meaningful innovation

You can look at this in another way: Linux distros are getting mature

are these distributions doing anything beyond repackaging the latest software?

You’re saying it like packaging the latest software is a trivial task.

typically featuring little more than a newer kernel, a desktop environment upgrade, and the latest versions of popular applications

If you don’t think these are meaningful to you, I don’t know what is.

Try phoronix.com if you want a more cutting edge reporting. They’re quite opinionated, but they’re usually on point about the exciting stuff.

What kind of errors?

Have you read successfully at least? By that I mean getting consistent dump.

You should check whether Pi Pico is supported by flashrom.

If it’s supported, then you can flash. At the end of the day, your BIOS doesn’t care how it get in there.

UMU

Gentoo is surprisingly reliable as personal system. I like how you’d be able to customize stuff compile stuff, making it leaner than most setups.

I’ve heard a lot of good things about SuSE, but it’s mostly from the community and not the enterprise side of things. I’ve never seen enterprise setup with SuSE, whereas the three I mentioned earlier I’ve seen all the time.

As a Gentoo user:

If setup correctly, absolutely.

Otherwise, it’s a nightmare.

I’d say in most case, you’d want to pick something simple to get you up and running, as well as to set a baseline.

If it’s work related, I wouldn’t go anywhere near anything that isn’t based on Debian, Ubuntu, or Red Hat.