Binary blobs

Binary blobs

It is very expensive, so ideally join a uni or school program that has acedemic licenses.

FreeCAD is a step below the AutoCAD suite. On shape is comparable for mechanical design. Siemens NX is top tier only matched in high end functions by CATIA. NX and CATIA dominate in Automotive, and Aerospace.

Depends what he’s looking for. I think Onshape (browser based CAD) has a free version. Your data is public though unless you go with a paid version.

If he wants a free Linux CAD there is FreeCAD and a few others.

If he is attending a university, as some retirees do to audit courses or enrich life, then Siemens NX (what GM, Stellantis, SpaceX, etc use) have an academic license for around $100 a year. It is now Windows only based, unless you run Linux headless version, but if you use any version NX12 or below there is a GUI LInux version that runs on REL or SUSE (or openSUSE since it shares SUSE binaries)

:) since your are starting all over, what about ZFS?

Wasn’t bcachefs being removed from the kernel, due to some shenanigans with the maintainer? Maybe it is unrelated to your issue, or maybe something has been altered

People hang out on public WiFi sometimes with packet sniffing and other tools to exploit people. Especially some distros don’t have X server remote display locked down.

If you want to know what is open or exploitable CVE you can run a script that discovers all CVE exploits against a machine

Last time I tried Ubuntu, it had a firewall but it wasn’t active by default. Unless something changed in the last few years.

No firewall means your system is going to get scanned to see if anything is open or exploitable

Some distros ship with no firewall enabled, some newbie using public WiFi is going to be less secure.

A pain with OpenSUSE tumbleweed is firewall and SELinux by default, but it forces you to learn about security if you need to setup SAMBA or other connections to your machine