This gets really political really quick.
Not saying that we all should be apolitic, but it’s like every little thing gets politicized for seemingly no reason.
Those who want to say their stuff belong exclusively to their kind can stay in their little corner, but Linux should totally be mainstream.
I have never of anyone calling C# Java.
Artificial Intelligence ❌️
Natural Stupidity ✔️
There’s nothing stoping you from gutting your distro and installing new kernel, libc, package manager, toolchain, and all the other components. The GUI should be trivial as people have change back and forth among different ones (within the same distro) anyway, assuming your package manager.
Of course, this begs the question: why the fuck would you do that instead of just installing a new one fresh?
Mint: consistency, versatility, having all the Ubuntu’s benefits (being industry standard, somewhat) without the drawbacks (Canonical’s opinionated bullshit like snap)
Debian: stability, predictability, leanness
Gentoo: customizability down to compile-time level
That narrows it down a lot. To be honest, I’m not familiar with that. However, with that specific of a topic, it shouldn’t be that hard to look up for articles to follow and come up with a course of action.
The reason why OSes aren’t ‘hardened’ by default is because it would be a real pain for users trying to set things up or use it for daily operation. If you take it to an extreme, they wouldn’t be able to access anything they want. If you’re a sysadmin, you’d be faced with your whole office pissed off because they wouldn’t be able to do their work.
Last but not least, what does ‘hardened’ mean anyway? You can have something as ‘hardened’ as an airgapped workstation in a faraday cage with an off-grid power supply. Are you running away from a government agency? I wouldn’t think so. So a firewall blocking unused ports and mindful practice should suffice.
What does that even mean? What kind of exploitation are you talking about?
Every use case comes with its own risk, and every risk needs to be handled differently. People jokingly said that if you wanna be sure, don’t connect your computer to the network at all; and if you wanna be surer, don’t use a computer. While that was a joke, there’s truth in that.
If you’re just going to use it as a workstation, then firewall to make sure some randos don’t ping you should suffice. If you’re sharing this workstation with your tech illiterate mates, then perhaps something to prevent executing random stuff like SELinux or AppArmor would do. If executing random stuff is just what you do, then set up VMs or some other ways to isolate that execution environment.
If you’re sharing files directly from your computer to the internet (e.g. with SMB or NFS), then you’d need to make sure only the right people have the access, and the auth can’t be brute-forced (i.e. with rate-limiting and lock-out policy). Same goes if you allow remote login (i.e. thru SSH). Some people use custom port number to obscure their stuff, and you can do it too, but do keep in mind it could make your life (or your mates’ lives) harder.
If you’re running other outward facing services like SQL database or HTTP, that would require different ways to address. If you’re on such level, you’d want do some serious readings.
What do you want to achieve exactly?
Different requirement can lead to different approach.
Honestly, I picked it because I was lazy. It’s such a low maintainance machine. As for the codec, the flatpak version of VLC does it.
I got openSUSE Leap. It’s stable and reliable. My complaint is that I needed to go thru all the hoops to get all the media codecs I need to play what I want.
EFF should GTFOutta US and set up shop in a safer region.
If it makes you feel better (or worse), thr NSA has contributed a great deal of work to the Linux kernel. In fact, they created SELinux, which you may be using at this very moment.
Wow, they just keep going!
I’ve said this many times, and will continue saying this again and again:
When in doubt: Linux Mint will provide everything you’ll need. You can distrohop once you understand the basics, customizations and optimizations can come later.
TLDR: SerpentOS rebranded
When in doubt: Linux Mint.
You can find something more suitable for your need later on, but this should give you a baseline experience.
I would steer clear of labwc or other minimalist WMs when you’re just getting started. In fact, try nothing but the basics first.
But are they ISO certified??
Lmao, I guess I wasn’t too far off.
I must be new to the scene compared to you folks!