I'll drop this: https://www.techradar.com/best/best-linux-distros It's written by an actual journo and not a bunch of nerds in nerdville!

Getting into Linux is a bit like Windows back in the day - interesting and a lot of fun ... and rather nerdy. My first Windows version was 1.0 and my last was 7. Mind you I do run a MS Silver Partner and worry about a lot of Windows servers and desktops but my daily driver is Linux.

Mint is a great choice, even though it isn't mentioned in the article I linked because you get a great community, which is pretty important. Its basically Ubuntu and therefore Debian too, so a lot of howtos will work.

I personally rock Kubuntu but I have a requirement for enterprisey stuff - ESET and Veeam and AD integration and all that. I also get Secure Boot out of the box and not all Linux distros work with that.

Your smart new laptop will have Secure Boot enabled so you will have to deal with that if you deploy a distro that doesn't. So with say Arch, you will need to turn it off or learn how to sign your kernels etc and that is not a beginner topic! I suggest you turn off Secure Boot if your chosen distro doesn't support it, rather than insisting on it. Its a nice to have but not the most important security feature ever.

You might want to show a bit of ankle and try out a few to start with. Most distros have a live CD that you can boot and try out first. I suggest trying out Mint, Ubuntu and Kubuntu. That gets you three modern interfaces to play with.

If you are into gaming then it kooks like Pop!OS would be a good place to start instead.

There is no real best option - it's what suits you and you have choice.

I doubt it. They make a hell of a noise and print at a rate of characters per second not pages per second. The ribbons suffered from similar issues as cassette tapes (the other ribbons that we had to deal with). The ribbon would dry out if not used for a few days and you'd waste paper and a lot of time.

DM printers were ideal in the guise of "line printers" - the big old IBM jobbies that munched through A3 landscape fan fold at ridiculous speeds. Home printers like the Epson FX80 or RX80 were at least affordable. I still remember the manual of our RX80 congratulating us on buying it and exhorting me to hug the printer on unpacking it. I suspect the Japanese to English translation might not have been the best.

We had to get a Centronics interface board stuffed into our C64 and get it working (sacrifice a chicken on a waxing gibbous moon night, etc)

It worked better on my 80286 box, some years later. I had to set it up in each application - Harvard Graphics, Word Perfect, Super Calc.

In around 1991 I was able to buy a 80486 based beastie, thanks to gift from granddad. In around 1993 I was given a HP LJ 4P so I could print out proofs for a Plymouth (Devon) tourist tat thing.

Nowadays I have a fairly elderly HPE MFP five toner humming away at home. Its on a VLAN that doesn't get to see the internet. It just works. I won't be "upgrading" it for the foreseeable future.

Use what works for you.

such not being able to mix with any type of license

GPL licenced software merely has to comply with the GPL - make your changes available to all etc. The whole point of the GPL is to ensure that you can take but enforces that you give back too. It's the Stone Soup thing.

MIT is loved by say Apple because they can take your work, do their thing and not have to contribute back. To be fair, Appley stuff is now quite a long way away from BSD!

As I'm feeling charitable, I should also point out that CUPS is/was largely Apple driven, as is Avahi/Bonjour. I can deploy a Linux box and expect it to find and setup available printers without having to do anything.

Evolution. It works with MS Exchange.

I have an elderly and rather unloved Gmail account for testing and spam reception only and a couple of Yubi keys so I'll see what I can do with them. I probably ought to use the Gmail account more but I'm concerned that Google will kill it off 8) I got it when the G stood for gigabyte because everyone else set quotas in the 10s or low 100s of megabytes. "Do no evil" Google were as cool as fuck but that was a long time ago. Sad really.

I find it amazing that so many distros with volunteers manage to curate a vast software ecosystem, reasonably successfully and yet some of the largest companies on the planet, worth more than $1T each cannot manage to find the resources to do it efficiently.

Imagine firing up a cmd or ps prompt in Windows and tying in: msiexec install adobe-hipster-app and it just works.

A scan performed by the researchers found that 77 percent of SSH servers exposed to the Internet support at least one of the vulnerable encryption modes, while 57 percent of them list a vulnerable encryption mode as the preferred choice.

That means a client could negotiate one or the other on more than half of all internets exposed openssh daemons.

I haven't got too whizzed up over this, yet, because I have no ssh daemons exposed without a VPN outer wrapper. However it does look nasty.

Good on you mate. I have no idea why you are being downvoted when you are being the big man when called out.

I do understand your position - it is bloody annoying to have to remind people how the web works but in this case you are doing a "show and tell".

When doing something like that I think you should show all and tell all. "Here's what I did and how I did it and here's how you can do it too". That's why I went in with the rather dodgy ankle reference! Think about when you see those influencers with worryingly pneumatic lips and arses that might double as seating for a friend. They show all, really all and some make a decent living at it. Now think about what sort of response you want for one of your show and tells.

I do confess that I used to do the same as you - I blasted away at someone on The Register a fair few years ago and was called out and subsequently apologised. That was a game changer for me and I suspect for you now. That doesn't mean that you can't get riled occasionally but make sure it counts and you are in the right or at least nearly right ... OK you think you are right 8)

Cool beans!

Cheers Jon

PS I'm 53 today

Employer here (UK)! I'm probably not normal being the MD and running Arch (actually) on my gear. I had to switch from Gentoo because I kept on burning myself.

For me, something like the LFCSA is something I respect because it is practical. Back in the day I did something similar (Novell I think). I've also grabbed a VMware ... whatever ... and that was a memory test and a waste of money. Who cares if you can quote the maximums?

When I'm hiring, I want to see application and knowledge and not a plethora of industry "quali-wankery"! You can always search for facts but knowing how to apply them is what I want to see.

Be flexible but do try to develop what sort of direction you want to take. What floats your boat out of dev ops, sysadmin etc?

You could also consider self employment/consultancy. I sort of fell into it 23 years ago ...

So you "make config" once and then you just tweak it from time to time! I used to run make config until I discovered xconfig (when X was xfree86) and settled on menuconfig.

I was still using menuconfig on Gentoo until around five years ago. OK I still have one or two Larry's lying around doing useful stuff but generally I just copy the old kernel config to the new one and compile away with genkernel.

make config did take a while back in the day. You literally run through the entire kernel's options one by one: y/n/m for drivers. I haven't done that since 2.0.x days. Then you forget to sort out lilo and reach for the boot floppy. No I don't miss those days.

They will if enough people whine about it.

In the old days (I'm 50+) tumbleweed drifted through ~/ apart from my drivel and I'd have a folder for that so /home/gerdesj/docs was the root of my stuff. I also had ~/tmp/ for not important stuff. I don't have too much imagination and ~/ was pretty clean. I was aware of dot files and there were a shit load of them but I didn't see them unless I wanted to.

This really isn't the most important issue ever but it would be nice if apps dumped their shit in a consistently logical way. XDG is the standard.

USE please.

Each to their own.