Typically the user group is identical to the username but not always. For example a name containing uppercase letters may be transformed to be all lowercase for the user but contain both cases in the group.

Thus you should get the user group in scripting separate from $USER

Ubuntu is a fine “nice to meet you” distro – the criticisms I’ve gathered happen a few months in. Nvidia+Xorg updates dropping GUI to TUI, MDADM shitting the bed and dropping RAID, the awkward 6 month upgrades where you go from old weird issues in apps to new weird issues – thou snap and flatpak improve this a lot over stock.

Canonical NIH, Canonical CLA agreement, history of charging forward only to abandon in house tech over and again after users get comfy.

Then there are inner politics and the occasional hankyness inside, or discourteousness like when they shit the bed dropping lib32 without talking to partnrrs like Valve on how this would effect their business after they made Ubuntu their target.

Criticisms typically are based in something. I had started using Ubuntu since 2004 IIRC and its been an interesting ride.

Oh also, PPA’s, avoid those, they’re not stock and don’t be surprised if your OS doesn’t boot with the less than stellar ones not staying in sync with the latest kernel updates.

YMMV and this is by no means advice on your personal fit.

Personally I am not fond of most casual user low barrier distros but I still recommend them. Manjaro, PopOS, LinuxMint, Endless, are all fine options depending on what kind of user.

I recently recommended one to a GameDev and considering SteamOS is Arch he decided on Manjaro over Debian.

YMMV, and its important to listen first to people to see what they want their machine to do.

One last criticism of Canonical and Ubuntu. Their HQ is UK based and I honestly wonder how the culture effects development. Germany, UK, California all have different “feels”, its hard to be more specific.

Choice is good, always keep your data backed up and the @home on a different partition. The differences across distros are largely not a big deal like they used to be. People find solus in being captain of their Linux adventure and even Ubuntu will do just fine at the basics, just know if you hit a snag it may not be like that on every distro.

I’m pretty sure my Arches with PipeWire audio don’t have it if that’s of any use to you.

I have used PulseAudio and PipeWire for years and the last few years have preffered the latter when installing all the optional dependencies.

Then again if it ain’t broke 🤷‍♂️

I thought signing up for Signal required a phone number and phone app – and all phones have IMEI besides many other nightmare anti-features.

For the normies it’s fine but tbh I’m not sure it’s as advertised.

What ever happened to that odd old app called tox?

Honestly I could see a version of DeltaChat + GPG make some gains in popularity but I would argue the email relay servers and spam lists are rigged for max surveillance.

Are we at the point where tech from 20 years ago may be the way lmao.

XMPP, IRC, ICQ /s

Matrix is probably the best bet but some of their apps and clients seem like dogshit. And I am saying that as someone who uses them daily. And the whole “server” thing is a PITA, or it used to be at least.

I guess we’ll just have to use carrier pidgin and cypherto encrypt the cat gifs /s

It may be a little too late but if you have a chance to use a feature like btrfs snapshots (+time shift) it can be a game changer.

Any time you need to do something risky to the OS you can just snapshot before like installing 1000 packages, or Nvidia driver update, you can just revert to the old working version by swapping the names on the snapshot and is subvolume.

If you dislike telemetry,

Audacity => Tenacity

Firefox => LibreWolf or FireDragon (GraudaLinux default, good in telemetry respects IIRC)

You may like btop, Mission Control,

Avoid any terminals and editors that advertise as “AI” – there were some big ones recently but the community thankfully overall was like nah.

Get some decent browser extensions, ublockorigin, privacy badger, libredirect

some people like to pihole their network, opensense/pfsense/ddwrt router is nice to have

AVAHI broadcasts your services on the LAN IIRC.

Obviously vscode has telemetry, if you use that try vscodium IIRC, personally I use neither but that’s just me.

RPI print server + sshfs?

I still never understood how V equals “Paste”

Do either of you know of a great warrior by the name of loves2spooge?

PLZ Add Publisher Launcher, it’s unfair that friends find me on steam and not my super favorite publisher fancy go clicky web 3.0 cloud store with digital lucrative dlc lootboxes for my simple consoomer satiation.

PLZ make it so if cheats r detect that GameApp.exe explodes the battery in their laptop.

Scratch that, explode the Solomonite.

deleted by creator

instead of curly brackets if statements are closed with fi

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7010830/bash-whats-the-use-of-fi

This is a fascinating concept.

If files are removed from the Index it would only seem natural that they can be undeleted until their physical address is recycled and overwritten.

In fact I remember something like this pre Windows 95 era where files were crossed out. Undeleting them was like magic.

This is why the windows term “Recycle” is more appropriate because the data remains until the space is reused or zero’d out.

This is the kind of reexamining we need, does our current iteration make sense from an engineering perspective or is it just a evolution of a bunch of archaic stuff from a time that doesn’t represent the present tech world at all.

I would be okay with replacing rm with recycle and shred as their function is more clear in the name.

True, I still think it’s fair to criticize the package managers and distros for not anticipating this common scenario and having the ability to roll back easily. How many millions of Linux users have experienced this issue? I’ll bet a few.

Debian, Gentoo come from another generation and sometimes it shows, I mean snapshots weren’t even a thing yet AFAIK.

This was definitely one of my least favorite things when I used Debian.

It shows that we need to think about how users are performing tasks and how to intuitively make their usage more successful. The OS should try to get out of the way and always have the ability to easily revert in the case of platform failure.

Even owning Smart devices and having them always plugged in may potentially be a vector, Rob did a good breakdown on how this is achieved.

https://odysee.com/@RobBraxmanTech:6/radio:64

Did you know that your IOT devices are secretly communicating with each other? This includes IOT devices that are not in your home. Did you know that what your IOT devices do may be transmitted to third parties? Did you know that your TV may also have the capability and may currently be transmitting your activity far and wide?

There are secret communications occurring between IOT devices using protocols like Bluetooth LE, Zigbee, Thread, 802.15, and LoRa that you likely didn’t expect or was not explained when you bought these devices.

Just like Amazon Echo has been conscripted to work with the Amazon Sidewalk Mesh network, other networks are in operation

I’ve looked, are there any clear winners I might have missed?

12.1" Damn. I would have gotten excited if it was a 6-8" device

It was a PITA on Arch because the Debian roots didn’t play well.

I canned all usage many years ago.

I think your best bet is to assume that everything you don’t control is a vector.

The modems run binary blobs you don’t control.

A standard modem with a singular hookup to a router is as good as it gets. Maybe you are contemplating the modem as a combo – if it is also a router and wifi, you can bet the ISP sees that as “Their Network” and not “Your Network” and any WiFi capabilities could be used to reverse hack insecure devices theoretically like smart TV or IoT.

You could put the modem router combo in a Faraday cage to dampen the signal theoretically.

That may not be answers to the query but I think the smart short answer is: yes, unless verified no.

Edit: to go further, theoretically they can capture any traffic and if they get the encryption key decrypt the traffic.

Or maybe with a quantum computer decrypt with ease. And if you have any leaks or there are backdoors then who knows what the consequences could be, cough cough xz