If containers, VMs, and dual-boot are banned in the workspace I kinda feel the fear of things not work is legit. When I’m forced to code on a Windows computer without WSL at university’s Programming course in electrical engineering department. Everything I’m used to, bash, cat, cd, ls, nvim, sed, grep, …, simply don’t exist. And I end up find it easier to code in the small text box of the site they provide than any of the slow, non-Vim mode, IDEs.
I am a Ubuntu to user now. However, I find myself reading Arch wiki far more and a bit Debian’s but barely Ubuntu’s. But I agree that Ubuntu is the industry standard and it’s acceptable to distribute a deb and test it on Ubuntu LTS and call it a day. Other distros can simply dig into it and make it work. Containers and sandboxes are great, but I hate the concept to only distribute things that way. Snap Flatpak LXC Incus Docker Podman etc. stuff don’t work on some restricted/weird environment.
And keyd to remap it on Linux, e.g., f23+leftshift+leftmeta=rightcontrol
VPN is a shifting of trust from your ISP to your VPN provider. If you already trust your ISP, you don’t need a VPN (except for accessing content that can only be accessed from another country). BTW, I think that Mullvad, Windscribe, and AirVPN are probably some good options if for privacy and security.
Let me recommend phice, a lightweight privacy-friendly alternative front-end for Facebook.
Ι stick with KDE Plasma after trying GNOME, KDE, and Cinnamon. In GNOME, many settings are not available in GUI (I don’t remember which they are now), while they are available in KDE. And back when I used Cinnamon it didn’t support Wayland while some of my apps (especially Waydroid) needs Wayland. But I mostly use CLI for daily tasks for automation and easier copy-pasting forum answers, asking LLM, and sharing to GitHub, so I may not be a representative DE user.