@obobskivich: Your post was the best and most helpful for me here. Thank you. Your suggestions are really good - I'm reading now about slackware and oracle linux and I guess one of the two I will use

1 members found this post helpful.

I don't get your joke, sorry. Does one have to be a Brit to get it?

If this is a desktop, I would not even consider Oracle Linux, just my opinion. Slackware has a huge, helpful community and has a lot of eyes on the parts and pieces. Oracle is a giant conglomerate that could care less about its users and is only interested in $. Again, just my opinion.

4 members found this post helpful.

tux2x,

No, but having a sense of humour does help.

The word “wurst” means German or Austrian sausage so it’s a play on words with the synonym (?) “worst”.

I agree - Oracle Linux is not really well documented for individual users, mostly because it assumes a paid support model (in other words, they probably care quite a bit about their *paying* users). That having been said, it's very cross-compatible with Fedora and Red Hat (it is based on Red Hat), and in my experience lots of things that work there, should work in OL too (e.g. EPEL is available, it uses dnf for package management, it uses GNOME 3 just like Red Hat, etc).

100% agree that Slackware is very well documented - just like Gentoo. That'd probably be my pick of the two, unless you specifically need the built-in audit features.

Ahh, ok. beachboy likes to make "jokes" about Germans trying to put them down as many Brits like to do, but doesn't even know how the word "Wurst" is spoken. The "u" sounds like in the word "you". The "o" in the word worst is the german Umlaut "ö", spoken like in the word bird. By the way, English has most of it's words from German...

Your opinion is good. I'm "studying" slackware now. I guess here I get to really learn about Linux.

tux2x,

I am not in any way mocking Germans.

It is a play on words. I know exactly how the German word wurst is spoken, thanks very much.

Grow up and also try to develop a sense of humour.

By the way, most English words are derived from Latin, Greek and French, not German.

@beachboy
you don't know me but judge me to be paranoid, having no humor and to be immature. Well I am mature, over 50y and I do have humor but still your "joke" is not funny at all. Also you refuse to admit that English is a germanic language as it's name already implies (the Anglo were Germans!). I guess the worst for a Brit is to recocognize that their ancestors were the bloody Germans.
Anyways you come off very arrogant and weird. Don't want to read from you again.

Can't help to think about this Youtube video of a Berlitz commercial:

https://youtu.be/yR0lWICH3rY

=OFF-TOPIC=
To be exact, most English words are of Germanic, French and Latin origin (all in about the same amount) with a few Greek words as well.

"The core of the English language descends from Old English, the language brought with the Angle, Saxon, and Jutish settlers to what was to be called England from the 500s. The bulk of the language in spoken and written texts is from this source. As a statistical rule, around 70 percent of words in any text are Anglo-Saxon. Moreover, the grammar is largely Anglo-Saxon." (1)

Now, where did those Anglo-Saxons come from?

"They comprised people from Germanic tribes who migrated to the island from continental Europe, their descendants, and indigenous British groups who adopted many aspects of Anglo-Saxon culture and language." (2)

And where from continental Europe would they've been coming from? Right, from the Anglia region in nowadays Germany.

Sources:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreig...ces_in_English
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxons

=ON-TOPIC=
Hope you found what you were looking for, tux2x. I found Ubuntu to be a pleasant distribution. Whatever distribution you choose in the end, the main thing is that they're all based on the same Linux kernel.

Personally I do like my privacy and I do have to trust Canonical not to have implemented privacy intruding tools. Knowing that if discovered, it would be the end for Canonical, is enough for me.

Not to stir anything up, and realizing I'm an Ubuntu/Xubuntu user myself, there does exist a 'problematic' script included in modern versions of Ubuntu called 'Ubuntu MessageOfTheDay News' which has been used to spam commercial advertisements to users (at least once that attracted community ire), and sends back more information than most people probably would be comfortable randomly sending over the Internet to some random place (it at least has the decency to do this HTTPS). You can read more about it here:
https://raymii.org/s/tutorials/Disab...ntu_18.04.html
and here:
https://ma.ttias.be/what-exactly-bei...t-ubuntu-motd/
and here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14662088

Cannonical's response to this was basically 'guys, just trust us' and then promptly did nothing to remove the offending code, or explain (with really good reasons, at least) why they need so much information 'coming back' (we can probably infer the 'real reason' is: they believe it will help them target advertisements or build some 'user profile information' or some such advertiser-fueled madness by generating unique user agents).

Also note: I have never witnessed this script execute from a local-only desktop/laptop machine (I set my firewall to watch for requests to/from the offending domain, which Cannonical was nice enough to make unique), and it appears to primarily 'target' Ubuntu Server via SSH (I've seen it attempt to phone home from 18.04 LTS Server in its default configuration - it does appear to honor its 'disabled' var), but this is very much 'weird' behavior that serves no beneficial purpose for the user (I'm sure some marketdroid would have something like "it offers a lot of unique offers for goods and services from our partners!!!" in mind though).

Final note: the script itself includes a configuration to disable it (you can also remove the systemd trigger, remove the code that triggers it, etc - there are many ways to 'kill' this thing), or you can just delete the entire thing (albeit not 'cleanly' - you have to go manually remove both the script and its configuration, and then remove the trigger in systemd - I've yet to find it as something that apt can just remove/purge), or modify it to do something else (e.g. create your own MOTD with whatever you want (oddly an officially supported/documented configuration by Cannonical)), and none of this will break any behavior in the OS.

This is *far* from as creepy as the kinds of things Windows does on a regular basis, but also not entirely 'welcome' especially when it was essentially undocumented behavior that they 'snuck in' only for it to be discovered once they started pumping out commercial spam thru it (if I remember right the message that got everyone's attention was an advertisement to watch some TV show in the USA at a specific time, which stands out against the typical 'random wise sayings' or 'random system information' or 'random update information' that some distros bundle into their dynamic login messages - technically the 'app' here is not the offending party, its that the 'app' hooks a webserver that Cannonical controls, and will regurgitate whatever that webserver sends out).

If you want to (really) make it all go away:

Edit /etc/default/motd-news to have:
And also run:
and
to remove the systemd timer (so it never calls on boot/login in the first place)

You can also modify/view the MOTD-News script itself at: /etc/update-motd.d/50-motd-news

Historically (around Ubuntu 12.x) there was also a bigger problem with the Amazon advertising application baked-in with older versions of Ubuntu/Unity, but this has been removed in pieces over recent releases (in true Microsoft style, they tied the Amazon advertising application into a bigger Unity package, so trying to remove the Amazon spyware also removed a lot of other non-offending programs - 'it cannot be uninstalled, it is an essential service!' - we've heard it all before...), and is fully and officially removed in 20.04 (although from memory, the last time I did a 'clean' 19.10 install a few months back, it was gone there too). You can read more about it here: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/01/...amazon-web-app
and here:
https://www.bettertechtips.com/ubunt...amazon-ubuntu/
and here:
https://fossbytes.com/ubuntu-20-04-l...mazon-web-app/

As I said - not trying to stir anything up, and I'm a happy Xubuntu 20.04 user right now - just felt it was worth pointing out that in the past these kinds of things have happened, and what the outcomes were. It does appear that with the 20.04, they were very much paying attention to the userbase - 32-bit support was retained, and the Amazon app was shown the door, and both of those things were largely the result of people being unhappy with their (Cannonical's) corporate decision-making. Contrast this to another recent OS release, macOS 10.15, which went ahead with exclusive 64-bit (over user objections) and broke a lot of things, and the official response is basically 'so?' I'd much rather have the Linux side of the coin - we at least can see what they're trying to do, and in many cases disable it/break it.

And note that I would also have no problems recommending Ubuntu/Xubuntu/etc as a desktop OS despite the above, but if the goal (as the original poster seemed to posit) is to both move to linux for security-mindedness, *and* really understand 'what is going on under the hood' the Slackware/Gentoo path will be a lot more educational.

1 members found this post helpful.

Well, that one was seen as a commercial ad by some users, but as a "fun fact" by Canonical employees. See this article at LWN.net.

@OP. That incident also shows what happens when a Linux distribution includes a suspicious feature: an immediate outcry all over Reddit, Hacker News, Slashdot and whatnot.

1 members found this post helpful.

That made me grin, sank you Hermani (I can't even write th, sorry