Personally I didn’t like Deepin and I didn’t really use it for long so I can’t say much about it. Anyway, it is part of the the extra repositories of Arch, so you can expect a current and maintained version.
It should be the same for other Arch based distros. Just stay clear of Manjaro. It should not be used by anyone.
In general it is safe to install as many DEs as you want. There is some overlap between (user) configuration files though which might be annoying.
It should be fine to experiment, but you might need to restore some settings afterwards. For daily use I would just stick to one DE. Personally I don’t think there is really a reason to use multiple DEs as a single user. It would throw me off and mess with my workflow.
Also keep in mind that many DE also provide a set of default tools which add clutter. So you probably want to keep it low for this reason alone.
Yea, fair point regarding the single point of failure. I guess it was one of those scenarios that should just never happen.
I am sure it won’t happen again though.
As I said it can just happen even though you have redundant systems and everything. Sometimes you don’t think about that one unlikely scenario and boom.
This happens. Recently we had a problem in production where our database grew by a factor of 10 in just a few minutes due to a replication glitch. Of course it took down the whole application as we ran out of space.
Some things just happen and all head room and monitoring cannot save you if things go seriously wrong. You cannot prepare for everything in life and IT I guess. It is part of the job.
I would put shell scripting basics higher up on the list as part of the introduction to cli, because that’s one of the major benefits over using a gui.
Otherwise it looks really good, maybe sprinkle some vi(m) in there, because it is the defacto default editor outside of Ubuntu and few others.
Also maybe focus more on iptools2 over the legacy commands like ifconfig, netstat etc as they are not available everywhere anymore (use ip or ss instead). It is still very useful to know both though.
Finally you should pay close attention to anti patterns like “sudo su”, “ps aux | grep …”, “cat … | grep …” etc and make sure to teach proper usage of the tools. I have seen it way too often done wrong in beginner guides.
If people ask me what distro to choose I say Mint.
Unless you already know what you want and need it is simply the best distro out there to get your feet wet. It is very competent in what it is doing and can be used by anyone no matter the experience.
Even though I believe there are better distros out there this is the only one I would recommend to people new to Linux and it is still a solid choice for experienced users alike. You can use it forever or branch out from there, both are very valid choices.
That’s a difficult question to answer. My intuition tells me that it does not work, because 2 desktop sessions would fight with each other. The applications you export are managed by the local window manager therefore the concept of exporting a whole DE doesn’t really make sense. I don’t know the answer though and it’s just my guess.
What the other answer proposed might be possible though. Take another tty and launch another X session there. It can even be another DE than your primary one. There you can have your own session with its own windows etc. I know for sure that this does work, but you might run into problems if you use Nvidia (at least it was the case a few years ago).
X11 forwarding can be amazingly fast and due to its nature the integration is amazing. I mean that’s basically its whole purpose. If you can secure your network you can run it unencrypted for best results or over ssh if not.
If you need full desktop sharing VNC is probably the fastest of all solutions I tested. It’s barely not fast enough for games, but otherwise it does a great job.
I know it is not really what is asked, but cron is a pain in the ass to handle and manage. I am not sure if it is officially deprecated yet, but I would migrate everything to systemd timers instead it is so much better. It provides configuration tools and proper integrated logging and troubleshooting tools.
Just create a service file of type oneshot which runs your backup script and a timer unit with the same base name. Set the timer to hourly, place both files into /etc/systemd/system, do a daemon-reload and enable the timer. You can see the status or journal for output and list-timers to see the schedule and wether or not it ran.
Usually if programs can run in a user context but don’t work as some automated process it is either due to environment differences. Most importantly PATH which can be solved by using absolute paths for programs. Another very common problem is the systems MAC implantation although it happens more often with SEL. Still you might want to check your AppArmor configuration and (audit) logs.
If you want to stick with cron also make sure to read the mails (/var/mail/root by default), because most cron implementations dump their output/logs there.
Unfortunately it has a habit of jumping around due to its asynchronous weird fuzzy search. So when typing fast you sometimes randomly launch the wrong action. It is especially inconsistent, because files are also indexed and by default it also includes web searches so the behavior is always changing.
I believe this got introduced with Windows 10 and feels just bad. Unless you are typing slowly and actually scan the results the search is doing a bad job as an application launcher like it was with Windows 7 for example.