Alpine Linux users are in shambles.

As someone who has done a lot of distro hopping in the past, I’ve found that going for a stable release that is widely used as a daily driver is superior for gaming than “gaming specific” linux distros, largely on the basis that the gaming distros have routinely had buggy UIs, driver issues, and a variety of unexpected and undesired behavioral problems tied to the array of “gaming adjacent” software installed, most of which you can install yourself with little to no effort and most of which you probably don’t want or need in the first place.

Great thing is that since it’s open source someone can just fork the project and continue development in a different direction.

Sounds like a hell of your own making. Always change the background to something generic. Like a nice tree. Always. Nobody gives a shit about trees.

I’m not. Universities aren’t places of open or free learning. They’re deeply invested in capitalism and benefit greatly from intellectual property laws. In fact, most universities function largely as state subsidized pipelines that take people without a viable, real world skill set and turn them into people who still don’t have a viable real world skill set, but who do have a piece of paper telling corporations that they’re able and willing to put up with complete bullshit, general mistreatment, and dull, grueling labor for years without incident. Which is good enough for your typical middle-class wage slave and whatever they might want to do.

“Freen Ginks”

This is the only realistic answer. Corporations have effectively decided that the future of the web is closed source proprietary javascript bloatware apps that are all functional skinner boxes. Many people, especially young people, have no clue how to use an actual computer. It’s “click the bubble to make it pop and give us your mom’s credit card number to unlock super premium bubbles.” That’s the future of the internet. But probably worse.

Is this a change I’m too “command line” to care about?

A “typical” home user, whom I assume is less knowledgeable about technology, is probably the person who would benefit the most from strict firewalls installed on their device. Such an individual assumedly doesn’t have the prerequisite knowledge, or awareness required to adequately gauge the threats on their network.

They also would not realistically be doing anything that would cause open ports on their machine to serve data to some external application. It’s not like someone can just “hack” your computer by picking a random port and weaseling their way in. They have to have some exploitable mechanism on the machine that serves data in a way that’s insecure.

Would this not be adequate rationale for having contingencies, i.e. firewalls? A risk/threat needn’t only be an external malicious actor. One’s own mistakes could certainly be interpreted as a potential threat, and are, therefore, worthy of mitigation.

I am assuming that there’s a hierarchy of needs in terms of maintaining any Linux system. Whenever you learn how to use something (and you would have to learn how to use a firewall), you are sacrificing time and energy that would be spent learning something else. Knowing how your package manager works, or how to use systemctl, or understanding your file system structure, or any number of pieces of fundamental Linux knowledge is, for a less technically sophisticated user, going to do comparatively more to guarantee the longevity and health of their system than learning how to use a firewall, which is something capable of severely negatively impacting your user experience if you misconfigure it. In other words: don’t mess around with a firewall if you don’t know what you’re doing. Use your time learning other things first if you’re a not technically sophisticated user. I also don’t exactly know what “mistakes” you’d be mitigating by installing a firewall if you aren’t binding processes to those ports (something a novice user should not be doing anyway).

Well, no, not necessarily. It’s important to understand what the purpose of the firewall is. If a device can potentially become an attack vector, it’s important to take precautions against that – you’d want to secure other devices on the network in the off chance that it does become compromised, or secure that very device to limit the potential damage that it could inflict.

You just wrote that “One’s own mistakes could certainly be interpreted as a potential threat, and are, therefore, worthy of mitigation.” The best way of mitigating mistakes is by not making them in the first place, or creating a scenario in which you could potentially make them. Prevention is always better than cure. You should never open ports on your local network. Ever. I don’t care if you have firewalls on everything down to your smart thermostat - if you need to expose locally hosted services you should be maintaining a cloud VM or similar cloud based service that forwards connections to the desired service on your internal network via a VPN like Tailscale. Or, even better, just put Tailscale’s service on whatever machine you’re using that needs access to your personal network. And, yes, if you’re doing things like that, you would also want robust firewall protections everywhere. But the firewall simply isn’t ever “enough.”

Anyway, just my 2 cents. The more you know and do, the greater steps you should take to protect yourself. For someone who knows very little, the most important thing that can help them is knowing more, and there is a hierarchy of learning that will take them from “knowing little” to “knowing much,” but they shouldn’t/don’t need to concern themselves with certain mechanisms before they know enough to reliably use them or mitigate their own mistakes. That said, if you are a new user, you’re probably installing a linux distro that already comes with its own preconfigured firewall that’s already running and you just don’t know about it. In which case, moot point. If you’re not, though, I’m assuming your goal is learning linux stuff, in which case, I’ve gone into that.

And like most things related to Linux on the internet, the consensus is generally incorrect. For a typical home user who isn’t opening ports or taking a development laptop to places with unsecure wifi networks, you don’t really need a firewall. It’s completely superflous. Anything you do to your PC that causes you genuine discomfort will more than likely be your own fault rather than an explicit vulnerability. And if you’re opening ports on your home network to do self-hosting, you’re already inviting trouble and a firewall is, in that scenario, a bandaid on a sucking chest wound you self-inflicted.

There’s a number of existing forks already. Most of them for porn. For the ones that have integrated with the last Tachiyomi update that removed native extensions, what you’ll be able to do is set a repository as an upstream apk source for whatever extensions you want. There’s plenty of those already on github. You just have to look for them.

If you run Ubuntu on a production server, you better having snapd disabled.

I don’t really understand the appeal of this. What command line software is there on MacOS that there isn’t an adequate equivalent to on Linux?

I mean, there’s over a thousand linux distributions already and it feels like they just don’t want it to be another drop of water in the ocean.

An OS is the interface layer between hardware and software. It’s the first code that runs after the boot loader, and it exposes an API for syscalls that allow user processes to allocate typically restricted resources, while also tracking and maintaining those allocated resources, doing process scheduling, and a bunch of other critical tasks.

All distros are operating systems because they ship all the tools and utilities need for the system to function

All distros contain operating systems (or, more accurately, kernels), or, rather, are built on top of them. A distribution is a collection of curated software, along with an init system and, for linux, package manager, and, frequently, a particular desktop environment. These pieces of software are, on some level, superfluous. You can have an OS without them. They don’t comprise the OS as a distinct conceptual layer of a computer system, of which there is the hardware, operating system, application, and user layers. The operating system is just Linux - because that is the interface layer between the hardware and software.

Saying “all distros are operating systems” is like saying “all cars are engines.” It’s just wrong. And I don’t care what wikipedia has to say about it.

Sounds like a distribution that they don’t want to call a linux distribution.

Which is…still not an OS. It’s a distribution. Specifically, it’s a fork of Ubuntu. To reiterate what the OP was saying, they’re catering to the Windows audience, who understand the concept of a “new Windows version,” but who wouldn’t understand the concept of a distribution.

I think by services they mean self-hosted, web-based services, or things like sshd - services which work by actively serving connections on a particular port or ports.