[ubuntu-studio-users] looking for a secure and private linux distro, with the following . . .

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Fri, 26 Jun 2015 08:01:49 +0000, Kaza Kore wrote:
>One of the best things about Linux in general is the ability to run
>them off a USB key without having to install!

I guess everybody on this list and other lists agree with this
statement. The different *buntu flavours and other distros often
provide live media. I would prefer to burn a DVD RW or CD RW over an
USB stick. It's important to be aware that DVD and CD are not nearly as
fast as an installed Linux is.

For newbies IMO *buntu flavours, excepted of Ubuntu, Fedora and Suse
might be interesting. A newbie should avoid distros with a small user
base or no mailing list, so I'm completely against e.g. Mint. Some so
called "major distros ", resp. famous distros, such as Gentoo or my
favourite distro Arch Linux aren't good for newbies.

Debian is a borderline distro regarding the abilities of newbies. They
have a regid policy regarding licenses. Btw. even *buntu flavors are
problematic regarding the license issue.

Something like this license ...

[rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ pacman -Qi linuxsampler | grep Licenses
Licenses       : GPL  custom:exception

... is problematic when using *buntu flavours or Debian.

Regarding privacy a user needs to care about the user space software.
There are reasons that Firefox has got competitors such as QupZilla and
Pale Moon. A user could install Atom Editor, an editor that will phone
home to its parents mum and dad Google, or other editors such as pluma,
sublime text etc. that don't phone home. A keyword when using Linux is
"self-responsibility", IOW before you do something, buy something,
install something, do some Internet research.

JFTR Linux Flash Player is outdated, is outdated, is outdated! HTML5
does provide most needed features, so no Flash Player is needed, but
assumed Flash Player really should be needed, then Linux users need to
install Google Chrome (don't confuse it with Google Chromium).
Installing the outdated Flash Player on Linux is ridiculous.

Assumed there's heavy usage of codecs, I would avoid distros who
can't decide to prefer libav or ffmpeg. AFAIK libav was/is a temporary
fashion of *buntu and Debian. The distro I prefer by default builds
against ffmpeg. This and the fact that not all hardware such as
scanners are supported by Linux (the kernel) is a hint, that Linux is
not a replacement for Windows, Linux users need to invest some time to
maintain their installs.