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No, containers further isolate the network and hardware interaction of the process etc

I was worried about that with Arch, and yes the setup takes longer, but other than that for me it’s just been “run ‘pacman -Syu’ every few weeks” and otherwise forget, been running like that for a few years. So I’d still say it’s set and forget tbh, just that the set part is a bit more work.

Your approach and understand seems realistic and solid. Go with any of the beginner-friendly distributions, as people have said, Mint or Ubuntu are good choices, because most of the support information online is available for them. Because Mint is based on Ubuntu, instructions for Ubuntu will almost always work on it too.

https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

The Linux mint installation guide is IMO very clear and easy to follow, so I’d start there, and for the first time you can just go up until the “the live session” section and play around with it before deciding to install. The guide for Ubuntu is very similar.

Good luck and have fun!

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No, they really are. No doubt they do plenty of stuff at the behest of the NSA, but they are also a deeply disfunctional company with conflicts between departments and bare minimum funding for security, since it’s seen as a cost centre

Ehhh that’s likely enough, but Microsoft is also just shit at fixing things

People who previously were at the high end of GPU can now afford used H100s -> they sell their GPUs -> we can maybe afford them

Idk (I’m not op) but I think when people say “can I install Linux on this” everyone knows they mean gnu/Linux. Yes, if I’m picking a container base image obviously alpine is also Linux, and if we’re talking about kernels then Android is too. But if we’re talking about desktop OSes then I think it’s close enough.

It’s a credit card/payment processor thing, i.e. ultimately it’s visa/mastercard, but it’s up to the bank to offer to individuals. It’s often available in other anglophone countries if your talk to your bank but I’m sure in some places they wouldn’t do that. But yeah, years ago is too long anyway.

That’s not a source. By that metric every American AV has an NSA backdoor. And, ok, both of these are probably true tbh. But Kaspersky publishes extremely good security research and analysis which is just technical and totally possible to verify independently, so there’s no reason to avoid those, even if you don’t want to use their software.