If you want to scan for vulnerable systems online, here is a list of operating systems that will not be applying these “privilege escalation” fixes.

https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.en.html

Have you heard of Distrobox?

Agreed.

Though if you get off the beaten path, you get things like system supervisor, system compiler, C library, and core utils.

But most Linux distros are systemd, GCC, Glibc, and GNU utils. Which brings us back to your list.

They are aiming for complete compatibility. They literally use the GNU test suite.

You are 90% of the way there.

Just keep your system up to date (update packages weekly maybe) and you will be fine. The system mostly manages itself.

I recommend installing both the current kernel and an LTS kernel. If you ever have a problem with a driver or a filesystem or something after an update, just boot into LTS and you are back up and running.

Unlike the Wine based stuff (Bottles, Winetricks), this runs actual Windows as a VM. So compatibility will be far better though performance will be worse.

Packages and package managers differ between distros. If you are changing distros, you should not try to preserve your package list. You will need to reinstall them.

However, you can often preserve your configurations and customizations by migrating the dot files in your home directory (or the entire home directory).

This is why many people put /home on its own partition. They can then wipe and reinstall the root partition while preserving /home.

You will get XFCE 4.20 at least. You can run Wayland now if you use Labwc as a compositor.

Even as a Wayland fan though, I would stay on Xorg for now if you are using XFCE.

Proxmox upgrade was flawless for me as well.

This is not the correct take.

For example, the suggestion to put /home on a partition to allow switching distros without data loss is an example of flexibility Windows does not have.

Most of the configuration that makes your desktop unique is held in your home directory, unlike Windows that spreads things across the system (such as the registry).

That said, if you do not know Linux, it is difficult to explain your options in a comment.

I am not sure what Windows automation you are referring to. If you mean upgrades between versions, Linux distros do that too. If you mean automatic migration from other operating systems, I am not aware of any Windows functionality for that.

MX is a nice distro. However, it is also true that it is just Debian with XFCE, KDE, or Fluxbox on top.

Your comment about not “being a fork of a fork” is ironic. MX Linux is a fork of AntiX which is a fork of Debian.

This is a not a criticism of MX. I love EndeavourOS and it is just Arch with a different installer and some sensible defaults. But I can also understand why some people look at MX and wonder why they don’t just install Debian with XFCE directly.

There needs to a single “App Store” where regular people can find free and paid apps that will work on all distros.

Basically, we need Steam for non-gamers.

Your mate is running a Jellyfin client on Unraid? Or the server? Unraid is a NAS that can run VMs and containers. It is not a desktop system.

If you were only running server stuff on that machine, I would recommend Proxmox.

As others have said though, basically any Linux distro can do what you are looking for.

If you are going to run it as a desktop, pick a distro that has a desktop environment (GUI) that you like and go from there.

Fun fact: Unraid is really just Slackware Linux running the Unraid application on top

Niri rocks

The appeal of Flatpak is not that I prefer it to my distro package manager.

The appeal is for the application author who finds the fragmentation in Linux a problem. It is a way for them to target “Linux” and not individual distros. It is a way for app authors to control the distribution and the support surface in a way that turning over control to package managers does not allow.

Which means the appeal for me is just that I can get apps as Flatpak that I cannot find in my distro repo.

On Arch, I hardly ever use Flatpak. On other distros, I use them more. I do use the pgAdmin Flatpak everywhere though because all the distro versions I have tried are garbage.

If you are using FreeBSD, you are probably using the Almquist Shell.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almquist_shell

BSD has not used Bourne since the 90’s. Bash is of course the “Bourne Again Shell”.

For Linux fans, “dash” is the (Debian Almquist Shell). It is the Linux version of the BSD shell. Dash is the default /usr/bin/sh in Debian and Ubuntu I think. So, pretty close to the same shell as FreeBSD.

In APK based systems (Alpine, Chimera, Adelie) there is /etc/apk/world

It is a list of all the packages you have explicitly installed. When you add and remove from this list (all apk does), the system solves for dependencies and makes sure you have the right packages installed.

You could bring up a new system by updating this file.

I was intrigued by XFCE on Wayland so I looked into it.

XFCE is not really available on Wayland yet. XFWM is X11 only and there is no XFCE compositor.

What Leap is doing is running the XFCE panel and apps on Labwc. When I have tried this, “it works” but it is certainly not as polished as XFCE on Xorg.

I am a Wayland fan so overall I support OpenSUSE moving to Wayland. This seems like a bit of disservice to XFCE fans though as I am not sure the DE is ready yet. And the take-away is going to be that it is Wayland that is not working.

limited functionality as it’s not the full blown .NET

This is misleading to the point of being completely wrong

On Linux, you do not have access to Windows UI frameworks like WinForms, the Windows registry, and to System.Drawimg (because it is just a thin wrapper over Win32). Essentially the entire .NET standard library is available on Linux.

I would argue that .NET is actually better on Linux for some things (like web dev).

That said, I can see no reason to use PowerShell on Linux unless you are a .NET dev.

There are PowerShell cmdlets that do not work on Linux. Again, mostly stuff that talks to explicitly Windows services and sub-systems. But that has nothing to do with .NET at all. Also, path separators and case sensitivity is different on Linux. So, cross-platform scripting is a pain.

Stable should mean that it runs stable, runs without crashing. In most Linux distros though, stable means “not changing”. That is not the same thing.

So, Debian Stable can ship software with a design problem that makes it prone to crashing. That problem can be solved in a newer version (more stable) but Debian will continue to ship the older version (the crashy one) because that is what stable means to Debian.

A good example is that Debian Trixie is about to ship with NVIDIA drivers from a year ago that have problems with Wayland. There are newer drivers that work better. But Debian will ship the old ones.

Static and stable are not the same thing.