Just use a distribution that uses the init system you want to test by default. The init system is a pretty central piece of infrastructure in todays unix, ditsributions need to invest a lot of effort to make it work well. The default init system always works better than any other options a distribution offers (if they even over options).

There are significant security/reliability improvements all over the place. E..g. logind actually works as promissed, which none of the clones do as they can not have the necessary infrastructure that is provided by other parts of systemd. Or udev using systemd-pid1 to start services: That fixes a well documented problem with udev starting services itself -- which most non-systemd distributions do till today. Problems do notngo away by ignoring them.

Checkout non-systemd distros, most of them still use group based access to devices a user needs to run wayland. Of course that does not matter at all for X11, security is so poor there anyway.

To be fair: Free software projects were and also are dying from lack of ownership.

And the existing free software projects tend to be old and make it really hard for young people to join IMHO. They avoid the popular (and proprietary) stuff, which makes them hard to discover and their processes seem archaic.

The OP has no experience with either immutable nor mutable linux. So let him go with the rubust version already installed over recommending some package-based, old-school distro, just because you are more familiar with those.

OP will need to learn things either way, let him learn the future proof stuff, not the outdated ways.

It is unfortunately developing very slowly and it is impossible to interact with git repos... which nowadays is basically every repo:-(

Take a look at jj. It is not as ambitious, but develops faster and you can use it with any git repository out there (as long as it does not need git submodules that is).

I use cargo-dist to generate the binaries.

Those evil companies block random users, just because their government made some laws about it.

No, I would prefer a world where not everything is concentrated on github, but that is the world we have to work with:-)

But how does this address any of the problems you brought up?

Do you think a project will be more discoverable when you say: "Clone foo/bar from github" or when you say "install this strange crypto-BS, then clone rad:xyhdhsjsjshhhfuejthhh just like you normally would"?

Apart from discoverability you get a known workflow for contributors, a CI and a bug tracker. Coincidently those make it hard for projects to switch away from github... how does this address any of that? "Use this workflow, which is even wierder than any of the other github alternatives!" and "just set up a server yourself"?

Sorry, this is just yet another crypto-bro solution in search of a problem. Technically interesting, I'm give you that, but useless.

The quote above covered exactly what you just said: "yet were also more likely to rate their insecure answers as secure compared to those in our control group" at work :-)

One more reason to run the steam flatpak: At least I can sandbox away things steam does not need to concern itself with.

The point of using the TPM is that it does not unlock the drive unless it has a certain set of software is loaded in a certain sequence on the machine with that specific TPM chip.

So if somebody breaks grub and makes it load a shell, then that results in different software loaded (or at least loaded in a different sequence) and will prevent the TPM to unlock the system. The same is true if somebody boots from a rescue disk (different software loaded) or when you try to unlock the disk in an unexpected phase of the boot process (same software but different sequence of things loaded, e.g. after boot up to send the key to some server on thr network. The key is locked to one TPM, so removing the drive and booting it in a different machine also does not work.

The TPM-locked disk is pretty secure, even more so than that USB idea of yours -- if the system you boot into is secure. It basically stops any attacker from bringing extra tools to help them in their attack. All they have available is what your system has installed. Do not use auto-login or run some root shell in some console somewhere...

Everybody needs just a small subset of that excel does, but everybody needs a different subset.

If you do not have all the features, most of your users will be missing something that is critical to their use case.