Is it your first foray into Unix? If so, it brings joy and a little tear to my eye to see such a properly motivated new user.
Joy, as you hit all the right spots for being a good Unix user (Great Editor Holy War notwithstanding), and tear, well, because of systemd, intelligenti pauca.
Maybe one day something like OpenBSD will find its way onto your machine. It works great on ThinkPads and doesn't even support Bluetooth!
Aand, come Russkies (that's what you meant, right?), Ukraine and the Baltic states would be dead by frontline bombers (look at Syria, American and Russian tactics are not all that different in that respect) and advanced artillery. Look, ma, no tanks!
Alacritous state actors more nimble at trolling than 4chan? You decide, I don't care. My problem is that US, Chinese, Russian and Macedonian sponsorships by state actors are equally unproved - if you read into "Trolls from Olgino" reports carefully. US's sponsorship is objectively less probable: English being lingua franca hampers American wannabe "hybrid trolls" [0].
Well documented analysis of a corpus of comments on some Latvian sites, yes. Anything in 100+ pages serving as a proof of Kremlin connections with the "hybrid trolls" (gotta love the newspeak)? Not so much. I don't know whether Russians are xenophobic aggressive bastards or knights in shining armor exposing the wrongdoings of others, it's just that claims along the lines like "Russia uses online trolling" seem exaggerated.
Debian testing is similar in "rollingness", Slackware and Alpine are similar in the sense of "no frills". OpenBSD is a good non-Linux choice to try out.
No, I haven't, at least recently. I switched to tiling about 7 years ago, tried a range of WMs (dwm, ratpoison), stuck with awesomewm for several months, but as it was changing to Lua-based configuration with too much of a flux, I left it for xmonad. Two things that immediately struck a chord with me were multi-monitor support and sane keyboard shortcuts. This post¹ may add something for you.
I learned of spectrwm only recently, it clones xmonad's UI, but is more practical (written in C, ini-style configuration vs Haskell code, doesn't need GHC installed). Painless switch for an xmonad user.
Suspend, for one, stopped working for me with sysv-rc. The fact that it's an 8 years old testing/sid mix could contribute.
I found that simple tastes make for an easy switch to... anything (for values of 'anything' not including lunatic fast-moving all-eating godzilla-sized init monsters obviously). My poison is some tiling wm (xmonad or spectrwm work best) + dmenu. A single config file is all you need (my spectrwm config is 4 lines long).
As for a system to switch to Slack seems to be one of the last Linux strongholds. Arch (like Debian) needs tweaking to switch from systemd. There are also those Devuan guys...
We'll see what future holds.
For some people the problem is that Ubuntu offers too much. For some it offers the wrong thing (systemd craze, for a start). Actually, if you're being involved with Ubuntu in a good way, learning things, trying out new concepts, I would say stay with the course. But try *BSD by all means, some time in the future :)
So, do you still use sysv-rc on your Debian/Mint? I've been trying to hold on to System-V on a Debian for what, about 2 years?, but some bugs found their way in after all and I gave up. Don't like the fact at all, installed OpenBSD wherever Nvidia is not involved and FreeBSD where it is, but still booting Debian from time to time.
Nowadays even Wikipedia has a section on JavaScript sandbox implementation errors. Even without taking JS into account, browsers, colossal beasts they are, have had a history of security vulnerabilities in HTML, CSS and image decoding routines. With JS added... again, Wikipedia says it best: "JavaScript provides an interface to a wide range of browser capabilities, some of which may have flaws such as buffer overflows." Ergo, no amount of "sandboxing" will ever save you from trouble.
Actually the better question is why would they care about Snowden leaving (or not leaving) Russia? Or why wouldn't Putin let Snowden leave? Snowden is a minor liability for Russia.
While you are being downvoted, I concur, of all the people mentioned in the Panama papers [1] Russians for one reason or another drew unproportionally much attention of the media. By looking at the source [0][2, for posterity] I can only infer that Putin is in the center of the web.
This entire discussion is fundamentally about whether or not one or the other side of the treaty is "forced" (or "tricked" or any word denoting "win-lose" situation)—otherwise why are all the negotiations being made behind the closed doors?—like many others I find the opacity of the US-EU TTIP talks disturbing but you're free to disagree. Anyway that wasn't the point of my post. I only tried to bring attention to the fact that W in the hypothetical NWO is not (and cannot be) the whole world. There are "important" countries that are out of the system whatever the system might be.
