Publishing a physical book is expensive, publishing a website is dirt cheap. For the publisher and author of a book it’s much more imperative to release good content that people will want to read, cover to cover. You can find more extensive, in-depth, and up-to-date content on the Internet but where exactly and is the info all in one place? Websites are also often made with the assumption you’ll jump around or that you know what you’re looking for. If you’re learning something new it’s often best to have a linear, paved path and not be your own guide.

Edit: Someone else said it first but I was trying to say library books are “curated” in a roundabout way.

I’ve been very pleased with ublue (Fedora) distros as daily drivers. They are very stable and low maintenance like you prefer. UCore sounds best for this purpose - https://github.com/ublue-os/ucore

Not a bad idea if you want a bare minimum solution but set up could be a bit of a pain. More info: https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/installation/openwrt_x86

If it’s a mostly self-contained app, like a game or a utility, then Flatpak is just fine. If a Flatpak needs to interact with other apps on the host or, worst case, another Flatpak it gets tricky or even impossible. From what I’ve seen though, AppImage and Snap are even worse at this.

As I’ve found out recently, finding true alternatives can be difficult. Take bread for instance. I just discovered Bimbo Bakeries own at least 26 brands. So when you’re on the bread aisle you probably have a moderate to high chance of buying one of their products.

For me it really depends on the use-case. A lot of times I want persistence but don’t really care to access the data outside of the container. So rather than using the extra brainpower to make up folders myself and ensure paths don’t change I just let Docker handle those details for me. Also I use Podman a fair amount and it seems to be more troublesome when it comes to bind mounts.

I was on Ubuntu for years but the Snaps annoyed me and I was looking for alternatives so I went to Fedora (Bazzite). Couldn’t be happier. I installed Bluefin on my laptop (slightly different flavor) and that’s been nice too, although some things don’t work as seamlessly as I think it should.

I probably made a small mistake in setting that up but I tried making the dedicated “home movies” folder and it wouldn’t show my videos.

Only issues I’ve had with Jellyfin are reduced flexibility in naming/organizing files and inability (for me at least) to detect personal media.

I mainly use my Bazzite machine for gaming and it was rough at first (~1 year ago) but it seems like compatibility has made leaps and bounds recently. I don’t play a ton of different games but I’ve had to do very little tweaking to make them work. 90% have been install-and-play. Usually ProtonDB can help you work out the kinks.

These are a good alternative to RPis. Just be aware some of these are sort of haphazardly assembled so they might have cooling issues or bad power supplies.

Bluefin and Bazzite have been good to me so far.

Pros and cons on the app store thing. Microsoft may curate a bit more but I think it’s inherently more dangerous. A malicious Windows app probably doesn’t have as many hurdles to get the necessary access to take over your system or otherwise cause trouble. To my knowledge, flatpaks can’t run with root permissions unless you executed as root (i.e. enter your password). Seeing that pop up should be way more of a red flag than seeing the “elevate permissions” pop up on Windows.

I think this approach is going to fair the best for mainstream adoption (i.e. Windows refugees). So I would agree that the “future” is going to involve immutable distros as a large, possibly majority, of all Linux installations.

Baldurs Gate 3

Doesn’t even have to be the key necessarily. Could get in via some exploit first. Either way taking over the machine became a 2-step process.

I don’t know the support model for Framework but they should really be able to work through these issues for such a common distro. With the various things you mentioned it doesn’t sound like bad configuration, it sounds like a hardware issue. Given that Windows is so different from Linux it may be the case that Win11 does a better job masking the issues.

In addition to other advice you could also use SSH over Wireguard. Wireguard basically makes the open port invisible. If you don’t provide the proper key upfront you get no response. To an attacker the port might as well be closed.

Here’s at least one article on the subject: https://rair.dev/wireguard-ssh/

I don’t think I encrypt my drives and the main reason is it’s usually not a one-click process. I’m also not sure of the benefits from a personal perspective. If the government gets my drives I assume they’ll crack it in no time. If a hacker gets into my PC or a virus I’m assuming it will run while the drive is in an unencrypted state anyway. So I’m assuming it really only protects me from an unsophisticated attacker stealing my drive or machine.

Please educate me if I got this wrong.

Edit: Thanks for the counter points. I’ll look into activating encryption on my machines if they don’t already have it.

Hoping it remains viable for a long time without updates. Syncing my KeePass database is really key for me. I need to fluidly add and read passwords from at least 3 devices.