Personally my favorite distros that I tried this year are the following:

General:

• Secureblue
• openSUSE Slowroll
• Fedora Workstation

Gaming:

• PikaOS
• CachyOS
• Nobara

I am willing to elaborate on my choices.

I have been liking CachyOS as well. I reluctantly switched from Fedora after I kept getting weird problems (definitely a “my PC” thing, I wish I could upgrade).

Features I like about Cachy:

• Auto-setup of snapper btrfs snapshoting (my fav feature of openSUSE) on all bootloaders (I like the simplicity of limine)
• Gaming ready fork of kernel-hardened, with some changes, including allowing use of unprivileged namespaces (needed by Bubblewrap/Flatpak/Firefox/Chromium to avoid the need of a SUID binary)
• AUR (cus it is Arch)
• Update service which updates from all installed sources (pacman, Flatpak, AUR)

What I wish was different:

• Inclusion of a full system Mandatory Access Control policy (SELinux preferably)
• Compatibility with hardened_malloc (idk why but on Cachy, GTK apps crash because glycin bubblwrap commands fail)

The point of my comment wasn’t that OP was in “real danger” if they showed local IPs, just that it doesn’t hurt. Never give more information than necessary. I censor usernames and filepaths on any screenshots of the terminal, even though if an actor has the kind of access to utilize that information I am probably already fucked. I think it is good practice to always scrutinize the information you give out willingly.

Just block ICMP lol /s

And I dont like GNU even more than systemd lol.

I was taught in my IT Sec classes to avoid sharing any unnecessary information. Information on private IPs can be used to better understand your network, allowing a threat actor to better navigate your network without needing to do ip scans (which are very obvious and should trigger even basic detection). While it is most likely pointless (since OP probably isnt at risk of targeted attacks), it is still good opsec.

I much prefer the looks and feel of GTK4 libadwaita apps over Qt6. I switched to KDE Plasma after using GNOME for awhile because I wanted to see if I noticed any improvement in stability, I want to theme my apps, and I prefer to avoid extensions (it is a security risk). I still very much miss GNOME with the 3-4 extensions that I installed, it just felt so much more polished, consistent, and free of bugs and broken features (looking at you theme search and desktop animations installer).

Run the following command in the directory containing the .desktop launcher: ./start-tor-browser.desktop --register-app

This integrates the launcher and makes it accessible from your start menu or app search (for your user).

My personal reasons for disliking systemd (note: I still use systemd):

• The lead developer of systemd has said multiple times that we should be fine with break POSIX if it means developing faster.
• systemd has massive attack surface, making it easier to exploit and result in privilege escalation. It is a highly complex and large codebase that really shouldnt be given the trust of PID 0
• systemd is not portable or modular.
• It only just barely got musl support. Hope to see it improve in the future.
• systemd is much slower than other inits (eg. dinit, s6, openrc)
• systemd being the go-to init encourages developers to more heavily depend on it, making it difficult for distros without systemd

The biggest feature I like about systemd is run0, though I wish it was a drop in replacement for sudo. Secondly, I do like that services can be sandboxed.

2nding RethinkDNS, since you can also use a Wireguard profile with it for system-wide VPN. Normal the app (and apps like it like TrackerControl) would replace a VPN because it runs a local VPN (using the android feature) to filter system traffic.

It started as a fork of the now defunct Mandriva Linux. Mageia isn’t a new Linux distro (in age). Otherwise it is just a normal Linux distro from what I can tell.

Valhiem

A browser is a while different beast. Firefox has half as many lines of code as the Linux kernel, just for comparison. Security must be topnotch since the that model is to treat the website as if it is already malicious. Even with all of Firefox’s developers, it lags behind Chromium in sandboxing/isolation and exploit mitigations.

• Most “Open source” LLMs are really just open weights, which is useless without the training data. This dilutes the definition of OSS. There is no way to train the model as a normal person (aka not Google or Meta, etc)
• LLM producers don’t credit the OSS they trained on, no attribution. Most models violate the licenses of all their training data (eg. GPL).
• LLM scraper bots put high stress on server infrastructure, creating a DDOS attack.

Alma is an LTS enterprise distro so gets pretty out of date after some time, and I don’t think it is significantly more bloated than Fedora because AlmaLinux is downstream of Fedora. Just uninstall the apps you don’t want on install. Even better is openSUSE Tumbleweed because the YaST installer allows for you to pick and choose every package (or group of packages) that makes it onto your final system.

What I usually do is sudo chown $USER -R /media/drive1

They specifically asked for a desktop operating system, so I recommended systems with a GUI. Proxmox comes with its own bloat, Arch would be far more minimal without the need for a bunch of dependencies.

If all you want is KVM, than any Linux distro + virt-manager will work perfect. My general recommendations for Linux distros are Fedora and openSUSE, because they are usually pretty up-to-date. Arch is also a good option, though not as stable. Choose KDE Plasma or GNOME when using GPU passthrough (because most guides will be made for either of these DEs).

I can’t tell if you are saying you literally mounted the drive at /media or that you mounted it at a subfolder, example: /media/drive1. The 2nd is the proper way of doing it.

Either way, glad I could help!

/run/media is for ephemeral mount points (like a removable USB drive). /mnt is for more permanent mount points. Idr what /media is for but I have seen some Linux distros also use it for removable media.