Because DoD isn’t concerned with the regular internet or unclassified machines as much as with the classified computers - those set up by Information Technician ratings and the Security Managers to handle SIPR and JWICS access. The Admirals, Generals, and O-6s are also often tech illiterate old men, and those just beneath that, and the E-7+ crowd, are often just as tech illiterate. Microsoft also has a lot of multi decade DoD contracts, which they get billions for. Microsoft can’t sell the secure version because that just lets foreign adversaries reverse engineer all the possible vulnerabilities. Microsoft only cares about security as far as they get paid for it and can get away with. In the consumer market, that’s pretty much zero concern - not profitable enough.

Really depends on your use case. Like @[email protected] said, casual users that use the OS as a browser and email client can use practically any distro. Users that do a bit more, like casual gaming on gold-rated Steam games, generally do fine with something like Pop!_OS or Linux Mint.

It’s when you start going towards the more hardcore users, like really hardcore gamers that play obscure titles or have unsupported Windows-specific hardware, artists that need very specific unsupported programs for editing or recording, engineers who need to do CAD specifically in a Windows-specific proprietary software, or a tinkerer that’s used to the Windows environment, that “become a sysadmin” starts being a reasonable complaint.

To be fair, the DOD uses a different version of Windows than you, me, or any average company, with a custom set of agreements with Microsoft, a bunch of debloating of Windows-specific apps and the addition of a bunch of military/government apps.

Did you make sure that you opened the terminal inside the folder where your iso and txt files are, or at least navigated to that folder after opening the terminal? Basically, it’ll say “file not found” if you run the CertUtil command while not “inside” the folder containing both the iso and the txt files. Same with running the gpg command.

No problem, and again - if you experience any confusion during the process, just let me know! I also had to get help with installing Linux Mint myself when I first got started.

It should be fine. If you’re truly worried, go here:

https://ftp.heanet.ie/mirrors/linuxmint.com/stable/

And click the version of Linux Mint you downloaded - it’s probably 21.3 - and then download both sha256sum.txt and sha256sum.txt.gpg by right-clicking -> “save link as…” to download the files themselves.

After that, verify the iso you had in your downloads folder by following the instructions here:

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

Again, as long as you downloaded from one of the mirrors linked on the Linux Mint download page, you should be absolutely fine. This step is a just-in-case, for your personal ease of mind. It will, however, need you to open cmd.exe and copy the code inside the green boxes into the terminal and press Enter. There’s a pictoral guide if you’re doing the verification on Windows still, right here:

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=291093

Let me know if you get stuck!

Guess it’s a moot point because as far as I know they didn’t end up using that name for their videos.

The sha txt file should’ve been available alongside the iso file from the mirror you downloaded it from. Honestly, as long as you used one of the mirrors that the Linux Mint website provided, you should be perfectly fine.

Good to hear! Let us know if you need any help with the install - some computers will try to fight the install, others are much more amenable to it. As long as you follow the instructions from the Linux Mint page, you should be fine.

Have you tried Linux Mint? That’s pretty user-friendly. As long as it’s a .deb, you can double-click install through a GUI, no terminal needed. There’s an “app store” with most of your standard apps, like Discord, Slack, Teams, Skype or VLC, and it has an office suite pre-installed along with an email client. The first time you start, there’s a welcome screen that helps you through setting up the firewall, appearance (you can make it look like XP if you want), backups, NVIDIA drivers, and update manager you can ignore or manually update or automatically update. I don’t know your system, but it’s pretty intuitive for Windows users (I use a Windows 10 theme). I’d encourage you to give it one more try, if you’re still open to it.

Hope all the other comments and suggestions are helping! Installation is honestly the only “hard” step for Mint. Once you’re done with this, it should be smooth sailing - and if you ever need any help, just ask!

Poe’s Law and the lack of /s strikes again!

But art, depending on your definition of art, has been sold for thousands of years. Even in Archaic Greece, potters were selling amphorae with intricately painted glazing on the side.

Seems like you’re trying to address systemic problems of learned human nature at this point, which is something that can’t really be done through software alone. There needs to be a fundamental culture shift for that. Yacy is mostly good because it’s self-hosted with the option to federate to a decentralized index, and so is able to be tailored to your own needs without any external entity. However, the tailoring process means that the initial search results are absolutely atrocious compared even to Google at first, and then get much better over time. SearXNG, on the other hand, is a sort of self-hosted aggregator of search results from dozens of other search engines, rather than being a search engine in itself. It also serves as a proxy, since it is doing the searching and not you.

SearXNG does pretty well.

There’s also an ongoing project called Yacy which is trying to make a decentralized ever-growing index, but it’s small enough right now that the results are still quite poor even when federating with other users until you spend enough time fine-tuning it, which most people don’t want or have time to do.

Get to know people in the hot sauce community (it exists!) and then you can ask person-to-person!

It’s not necessarily just about the government. Built-in backdoors also give malicious actors more ways to access your own private information, whether to steal your identity, transfer money out of your bank account, use your credit for loans, or blackmail you. Also, other governments already use your online speech to arrest you for saying things they don’t like - see China or Russia. Many EU countries are only one election away from having a government that goes in that direction already. This is only going to make it that much easier for them.

Veilid is a peer-to-peer network and application framework released by the Cult of the Dead Cow on August 11, 2023, at DEF CON 31.[1][2][3][4] Described by its authors as “like Tor, but for apps”,[5] it is written in Rust, and runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, iOS,[6] and in-browser WASM.[7] VeilidChat is a secure messaging application built on Veilid.[1][4]

Veilid borrows from both the Tor anonymising router and the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), to offer encrypted and anonymous peer-to-peer connection using a 256-bit public key as the only visible ID. Even details such as IP addresses are hidden.[4]

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veilid

Poe’s law strikes again, you forgot this: /s

SearXNG works all right for me, and it’s free. I’ve also heard good things about the paid service Kagi.