‘Snap’. I have been advised that snap packages are as big a security risk as telnet or finger. Because of this I no longer moderate on the Zorin Forum. I am now free of Ubuntu bloatware and am now running Devuan 3.0. For the first time I have been able to have a system free of systemd and been able to remove Pulse Audio without removing the system, but first having to install ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) before doing so. Pulse Audio includes a ridiculous package called rtkit; this is not a root kit but might as well be as it channels resources in real time potentially making the system vulnerable. From my investigations the biggest culprit in this is the Gnome Project which has embedded Pulse Audio in the DE. I am now only running KDE and LXQt Desktop Environments on Devuan and I am also, come Christmas leaving Feren OS behind too for the same reason in respect of Pulse Audio but also Flatpak which is also bloatware.
Ubuntu really is pushing SNAP hardcore and I must admit, it gets pretty wearing trying to waylay it when they prefer to tell us what we want, Microsoft style, instead of listening to us.
Yes, just like Gnome - it is only recently that I discovered that it is the Gnome idiots that hard-wired pulseaudio into the DE - so when you try to remove it it takes the whole system down… The guilty creator of Pulse Audio and other garbage that found its way into GNU/Linux:
Sadly Cinnamon too has Pulse Audio and its rtkit package hardwired too, so choice is limited in some respect. There are numerous spin-offs of Devuan:
I’ve also been looking at a very light distro, Obarun in Qemu.
Have yet to try Archtis - the LXDE was disappointing in minimalistic setting but I guess you could add things to it but not sure. The new kid on the block appears to be s6-Linux-init to boot the system which seems to be taking off in a wide variety of distributions:
It is also nice to get away from Ubuntu based User Access Control. I have a separate Administrator account on Devuan so to run as root in the terminal:
$: su
password for root: xxxxxxxxxxxxx
#: then ‘sudo [whatever]’