Goodbye Windows, Hello Linux [advice needed for a Linux workstation at home]

[Nominal Animal]

Gkh turned an inlined function into a regular one, and while doing so marked it GPL-only. I don't see this as 'doing extra work' as much as giving the finger to modules that used that function.

Re-read the first message in the thread that quotes the original patch submission that explains the change.  There is a sound technical reason for the change, and it involves the kernel internal pre-emption mechanism and the use of FPU registers (which can be slow to save and restore, and therefore are avoided if possible).   The change to GPL-only is at the core of it, because it ensures that the kernel developers only need to worry about in-kernel users in the future, and have their hands free regarding pre-emption and FPU register state maintenance mechanism.

You, like Stephan von Krawczynski, are looking at the matter purely from your own emotional standpoint.  You hate the Linux kernel developers -- Krawczynski even claimed this is a moral issue, not a license or a technical one! --, because it makes your life more difficult.  You are even switching to FreeBSD because of this.

Yet, the matter is simple.  The kernel developers do not want to limit their future options just to appease a group of developers who do not want to co-operate with the Linux kernel developers.  That, the maintenance cost and limitation of future options, is the cost you refuse to acknowledge.

The ZFS developers, and their choice of license, is at the root of this problem.  You, as an end user, do not care, because you do not distribute ZFS code, so the license is irrelevant to you; to you, it is just fine and perfectly good license -- because its restrictions and limitations do not apply to you.

If the ZFS developers wanted their code to be included in the Linux kernel, they would grant a GPL-2.0 license to the code, and ZFS would be included in the Linux kernel lickety spit.  Some posters in that thread claimed that SFLC or others have deemed the ZFS license already compatible with GPL-2.0 -- but if so, why won't the ZFS developers just dual-license their code?  If the licenses are compatible, what harm would it do?  Linux kernel developers do that constantly, dual-licensing various drivers to BSD, so that the BSDs can reuse the same code.  Are the ZFS developers some kind of übermensch, who are not to be subjected to the same ethical and moral rules as everyone else?

Essentially, you are saying that Linux kernel developers are bad people, because they don't do like you want them to do, and you refuse to look honestly at the reasons, instead claiming they are just being unreasonable.  Boo-fucking-hoo.  Get over yourself.


Before you jump to any conclusions about me, do note that I have no particular love for the Linux kernel developers either.

I respect some of their technical ability, and call their antics as I see them.  Stuff like adding an ioctl() to do the exact same thing that a write() already does to for the uinput character device driver, with the idea that "perhaps we might wish to extend this interface that hasn't changed at all in the last decade", like Benjamin Tissoires did in 2015, is idiotic and wasteful.

In 2015, gregkh tried to push the horrible kdbus abortion into the kernel, but at that point the Code of Conduct didn't ban calling a turd a turd, so it was rightfully dropped like the smelly little pile of poo it is.

And I've made it particularly clear that their response to bug fixes from outside their clique is atrocious.  They just don't seem to bother checking them, even when the dev that introduced the bug is CC'd.  This bug still exists, as does this one here as well.  It is a trivial bug, easily fixed; and unless fixed, an executable with a backslash-n in its name, looks exactly like an executable with a similar name except with a linefeed instead of blackslash-n in kernel-provided pseudofiles (used by top and other tools). A crafty little nastybin can fool both human and automated checks on the binary it actually executes.  Leaving that simple bugs unfixed is just stupid.

[bd139]

LMAO at the kdbus thing. So true. So true. Nice to see some FreeBSD / ZFS love in the wild in this thread 

Going back to the original point. I'm a lame ass. I'm sitting here as a Linux developer / admin / architect and what am I using? Manky old Thinkpad running windows 10. I couldn't switch to Linux myself. The hypocrisy! 

[Doctorandus_P]

I ditched windoze when the latest version started booting into a screen with Blue Tiles of Death.
I couldn't even find a normal "start" menu, and I had such an aversion against being forced into somebody elses Idea of a UI that it was the final straw.

For people curious about Linux, I can highly recommend Mint (although I use plain old Debian myself currently)
Just download an image from:
https://linuxmint.com/download.php
Burn it onto an USB stick and boot from it.

If you're more serious, but don't want to give up your current OS yet, Just invest USD25 in a new SSD and put that in your PC solely for Linux.
No need to change even one bit on the disk drive of your current OS.
You can select from which drive to boot on startup of your PC. They all have this selection as part of their Bios / Uefi.

[apis]

If you're more serious, but don't want to give up your current OS yet, Just invest USD25 in a new SSD and put that in your PC solely for Linux.
No need to change even one bit on the disk drive of your current OS.
You can select from which drive to boot on startup of your PC. They all have this selection as part of their Bios / Uefi.

Yup, and you need less than 32 GB for a Ubuntu 18.04 install, so you don't need an expensive disk. Mint probably uses something similar.

[radar_macgyver]

... lots ...

Thanks for the information. Please refrain from making claims about whom I hate however. I don't 'hate' anyone, they made a change, it makes my life as a sysadmin harder but I have a plan which coincidentally some kernel devs themselves advocated. I will continue to use Linux on the desktop however. Right tool for the job, or something like that.


Back to the original topic.

[OwO]

I'm looking at it from a purely practical point of view: ZFS and BTRFS are the only two filesystems on Linux that do data checksumming. If you ever encounter bit-rot (and you will because commodity HDDs are not reliable) the rest of the filesystems will silently corrupt your data without you having any way of knowing. md-raid, lvm, etc also have NO mechanism to detect bit-rot, and one bad drive in a RAID array WILL corrupt the entire array when data is read and written. I don't know why people still recommend putting your valuable data on ext4 or on a RAID array because you are going to be in for a nasty surprise. I've never used BSD or any variants (unless Mac OS counts) and not a ZFS fanboy of any sort, but I think Linux really lacks a good filesystem with proper multiple device support and have a good track record w.r.t data integrity (btrfs is almost there but not quite).

[apis]

I believe modern drives have error correction codes built in, the disks will detect and correct bit errors by themselves. So bit rot is less of a problem than what the ZFS marketing says. The world managed without ZFS for a long time. That said, I don't mind the extra layer of data security and ZFS has many other nice features as well.

[ruffy91]

According to my own experiences ZFS will have silent corruption due to bugs (they did in the last year) or if you don't use ECC Ram.
BTRFS won't have silent corruption, if something gets corrupted you will get errors and will be unable to ever recover the filesystem (for example hard shutdown -> corrupt FS and no recovery tool/fsck).
Just had a power outage and all my btrfs VMs are unusable now.
The VMs using ext4 I just did a fsck and it threw away the journal and it works again, but everything written in the last few seconds before the outage is lost now. Had to restore all the BTRFS VMs.

Conclusion: Use ZFS only if you follow all their recommendations (16 GB ECC Ram etc.) and do regular Scrubs.
Also if you use one of these filesystems you absolutely have to have good working backups. You will have to restore from backup every time there is corruption.

With BTRFS you will have to restore everything sometimes. Make sure you can do so in an acceptable timeframe.

[technix]

Just throwing this out here: if you are okay with buying a second hand AMD RX 580 graphics card (should be around the US$100 mark now,) maybe put Hackintosh into consideration?

[gnif]

According to my own experiences ZFS will have silent corruption due to bugs (they did in the last year) or if you don't use ECC Ram.

I couldn't agree more!, also note that if you have an overclocked CPU, no amount of EEC ram will save you from errors if your overclock isn't 100% stable. In short I would never run an overclocked system with ZFS, I have been burnt by this before.

[Simon]

I'm jumping in at the tail end here but I wanted to switch to linux and gave up. Linux is a funny old world. Free is not free. You get the code for free and if yau can't make it work screw you or pay people for support. So you will have to on you own:

Figure out how it works
Get any device younger than 10 yrs old to work
forget wifi adapters
forget 4K screens
have no software support for commercial packages and hope you can make them work.

Linux was never meant to be free to the everyday user. It was meant to be free to the nerds to do with it as they please and as a consequence there is no high level standardization and unless you are an initiated nerd you get nowhere.

I pay £10 per month for a cPanel licence on my server because while there are plenty of so called free solutions out there they come with no assistance and the only way to get any real help is to pay someone an hourly rate to fix something they have probably fixed a ton of times before. With cPanel I pay a predictable amount for for a well tested product that has most things sorted, but even then they try to get you to part with more money by claiming that their version of linux is more secure when no doubt it is the same centos linux that is the only one cPanel runs on with some tweaks.

I hate windows and microsoft but they are far less painful than the so called open source world. I don't care for getting to read the code that I don't even understand I just want the damn thing to work rather than have to rely on some one with potentially no commitment doing it in their spare time.

[RoGeorge]

Wow, every reply since my last post was a bummer.   
To summarize:
1. ZFS won't be usable with Linux 5 kernel expected this year.  Didn't know that, thank you for pointing it out.
2. ZFS can have silent corruptions, especially on non ECC RAM machines (or, silent corruptions due to ZFS bugs even if the machine has parity RAM), while btrfs will almost certainly become corrupted at a power outage or a hard shutdown.  This disqualifies btrfs for my usage.

Questions:
- Will the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Long Time Support up to 2023) keep the Linux kernel at v4 for the next 4 years, and not silently upgrade to v5?
The LTS wiki doesn't mention about kernels, so I'm not sure: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LTS.  My hope is to use Ubuntu 18.04 LTS instead of 18.10 I have now, therefore stay with a v4 kernel for the next years, so I could still use ZFS until ZFS will be able to work with v5 kernels.  I don't think ZFS and Linux will diverge forever.

- Do I still need backup with a mirrored ZFS?
My hope was to use mirrored disks with ZFS + snapshots, and never bother with backups.  It's a home setup, with ZFS only for long term storage.  The worst damage that can happen would be to lose family pics or personal projects, nothing enterprise level or time critical.  My plan was:  If one disk become corrupt, just use the mirror one, and later restore the integrity of the array.

Also if you use one of these filesystems you absolutely have to have good working backups. You will have to restore from backup every time there is corruption.

[BravoV]

A failed attempt as well when I upgraded my desktop to new Ryzen system, when it was new, got failed miserably, as the distro it self pushing a legit recommendation update for the newly Ryzen chipset, as noob, blindly followed as the standard installation image didn't have that new chipset support yet, and yielded an instant lock down and failed booting even from cold boot, it just left me as linux noob scratching head. 

Luckily I still have my Windows SSD drive image.

[rdl]

I have never heard of these ZFS issues. I've only heard that it was an enterprise grade file system and was relatively drive agnostic. The FreeNAS recommendation was 8GB of ECC RAM minimum, so for my personal NAS (1user) that is what I use. The machine, which needs less than 50 watts power, is on a UPS just to be safe.

I have 4 drives. I started with two WD Blue 2 TB mirrored. I upgraded last year and added two 4 GB WD Red, also set up as a mirrored pair. I copied all the data on the blues over to the reds. For now, I keep the two pairs synced.

I also make occasional back up syncs to my old WHS 2011 machine which has a WD Green 2 TB backed up to an external WD Green 2 TB. So I essentially have six copies of everything, most of the time.

It doesn't seem that I need to worry much about data loss. I think the only thing lacking is some kind of "off-site" back up.

[Monkeh]

I'm jumping in at the tail end here

With the same old nonsense.

Figure out how it works

There's lots of documentation.

Get any device younger than 10 yrs old to work

Not very problematic, I don't own much stuff that old, and it all works..

forget wifi adapters
forget 4K screens

Rubbish.

so called open source

'so called'? Just because you don't care doesn't mean it isn't.

[Monkeh]

while btrfs will almost certainly become corrupted at a power outage or a hard shutdown.  This disqualifies btrfs for my usage.

Having had several power outages and an SSD which simply vanishes after a random period of time running btrfs and having no corruption, loss of data, or other issues, 'almost certainly' is rather an extreme exaggeration.

[Simon]

I'm jumping in at the tail end here

With the same old nonsense.

Figure out how it works

There's lots of documentation.

Get any device younger than 10 yrs old to work

Not very problematic, I don't own much stuff that old, and it all works..

forget wifi adapters
forget 4K screens

Rubbish.

so called open source

'so called'? Just because you don't care doesn't mean it isn't.

Well thankyou for the insults. I have tried linux from time to time and every time it has been simply too much effort. Most people who advocate linux are hardcore users and well if they love linux and tinkering with it that is fine but you can't just choose to use linux as an operating system as it is NOT designed for the casual user which is evident from the virtually no control panel but for some very basic options most things are done on the command line. Windows is designed to be intuitive to a degree and most (the absolute vast majority) will get by without command line interventions.

This is of course added to the fact that most commercial software does not have a linux version and never will as there are so many versions that no comercial outfit in their right mind will even attemp to service all of them. We really need a ubiquotus linux like we have a one and only windows which for better or worse is just one flavour of an operating system not dozens with everyone claiming that theirs is the best.

So pray how does the average user get any wifi adapter working and a 4K screen to work? this is trouble enough on windows.

[Monkeh]

So pray how does the average user get any wifi adapter working and a 4K screen to work? this is trouble enough on windows.

In the majority of cases, they don't have to do anything. Install a desktop distro, things work. 4K is just a high resolution - it's no different to driving any other monitor. And wifi mostly just works.

[Simon]

So pray how does the average user get any wifi adapter working and a 4K screen to work? this is trouble enough on windows.

In the majority of cases, they don't have to do anything. Install a desktop distro, things work. 4K is just a high resolution - it's no different to driving any other monitor. And wifi mostly just works.

Never happened for me. The only time wifi worked was when I used it on a laptop and when I used some cheap chinese adapters that probably had older and very generic chips but it's luck of the draw. buy a new 5GHz adaptor and wish yourself luck!

4K monitors, sure they are just another resolution but as it happens there is more to monitors than pexil count but pixels per inch. So far pixel density has been pretty constant and it never mattered but with 4K things change, the pixel density is usually doubled and the OS/graphics needs to know about it and handle it. Windows is only just getting to grips with this with mixed results for programs not specifically written for high dpi.

Sure I can set my 4K monitor to HD but that is the monitor offering support to linux not linux supporting 4K. I live to live this side of the millenium if that is not too much to ask.

[Monkeh]

So pray how does the average user get any wifi adapter working and a 4K screen to work? this is trouble enough on windows.

In the majority of cases, they don't have to do anything. Install a desktop distro, things work. 4K is just a high resolution - it's no different to driving any other monitor. And wifi mostly just works.

Never happened for me. The only time wifi worked was when I used it on a laptop and when I used some cheap chinese adapters that probably had older and very generic chips but it's luck of the draw. buy a new 5GHz adaptor and wish yourself luck!

I don't need luck, I have the Internet. I am capable of researching things to make sure I don't buy a turd (ps. there are lots of turds for Windows, too).

I have PCI, PCIe, USB, and SDIO (or was that one UART? eh..) wifi interfaces from every major manufacturer going back to the dawn of wifi, and all of them work.

4K monitors, sure they are just another resolution but as it happens there is more to monitors than pexil count but pixels per inch. So far pixel density has been pretty constant and it never mattered but with 4K things change, the pixel density is usually doubled and the OS/graphics needs to know about it and handle it. Windows is only just getting to grips with this with mixed results for programs not specifically written for high dpi.

Wow, I mean, in 20+ years of using computers, I never knew that. Oh, wait..

Linux is pretty good at that now - and it has room to be improved without waiting on certain uncaring organisations.

I live to live this side of the millenium if that is not too much to ask.

I like people to use the resources this side of the millennium provides, if that is not too much to ask.

[radar_macgyver]

Anecdotes don't substitute for evidence, but here goes. In my day-to-day, I've had to support a couple of ZFS and btrfs filesystems. The ZFS file systems (data storage for radars) are on large servers (Supermicro 15 or 24 disk chassis) and I followed the advice of the ZoL community and did the following: large amounts of ECC memory, CPUs with lots of cores, not using SATA interposers with SAS backplanes, use nearline or enterprise grade SATA or SAS disks, use raidZ6, periodic scrubs. The file systems range from 8TB to 48TB, all of which have been running 24/7 for many years (at least 7 in one case). The drives get a lot of sustained writes while the radars operate, and lots of reads when folks want to analyze data from them. When drives fail, they will email me a warning and I go swap them out. At least once, one of the large arrays caught a case of 'bit rot' (ZFS reported a CRC error during a scrub even though the drive itself did not). I preemptively replaced the drive anyway. I've had multiple drive failures (approximately one every 2 months) but never lost any data. By comparison, commercial systems we had previously used (EMC, Sun Microsystems, Coraid) have all ended up losing the array and having to restore from backup.

On a trial basis, I set up a NAS at home using FreeNAS. Once again, I followed the advice on FreeNAS forums and got a Supermicro Mini-ITX Xeon E1540D board, 16 GB ECC memory and four nearline 4TB SATA drives (rated for 24/7 use). It's been going for about a year now with no trouble, but it doesn't see nearly as many reads and writes as the ones mentioned above. After kernel 5.0 ZoL would either stop working or have a significant performance hit, so I might migrate some of my work servers over to FreeNAS (they are currently on CentOS).

As for btrfs, I use it as the root FS on various workstations so that I can make snapshots and back them up hourly. In this case, the workstations don't do parity striping (raid5/6), so I'm not worried about the btrfs write hole bug. Once again, across about a dozen filesystem instances, I have never lost any data yet due to an FS bug; I have lost data to hardware errors but the backups meant it was painless to recover. I've occasionally used btrfs' ability to expose copy-on-write at the filesystem level (cp --reflink=always) when making a copy of a source tree that I wanted to modify, and not take up more disk space).

I am forced (thanks to Solidworks and Altium) to use Windows on a couple of boxes, these use rsync for backups and every so often I get the 'file disappeared' messages because I couldn't snapshot the FS before backup (yes, I should figure out how to use VSS for this).

[Nominal Animal]

Linux is a funny old world. Free is not free. You get the code for free and if you can't make it work screw you or pay people for support.

Yes, this is absolutely true.  Good or bad, that's how it works.  Me, I like it; I can work with that.

Linux was never meant to be free to the everyday user. It was meant to be free to the nerds to do with it as they please and as a consequence there is no high level standardization and unless you are an initiated nerd you get nowhere.

I dislike the "nerd" and "initiation" there as much as radar_macgyver disliked my use of "hate" earlier, but other than that (and the claim about lack of standardization), that is correct.

It was never about helping other people, or giving them something for free.  It was, and still is, about developers being free to do what the heck they want, without any kind of artificial barriers.  The way how the licenses are completely irrelevant to end users, and only affect how and what developers can do with any given piece, should be a dead giveaway.

(Initiation is an incorrect term, because it implies that you need to be accepted.  No, you don't, you do not need to be accepted in any way.  If you want, you can fork the Linux kernel codebase, and go in your own direction.  It is only when you want to work with other people, or use their work, that you need to talk to them.  I'm definitely not "an initiated nerd", yet I do whatever the heck I want with Linux.  So, you only need to be "initiated" if you want the already "initiateds" to work with your code, like accept your bug fixes or additions.)

(Lack of standardization is plain wrong here, because basically all of the internet standards we use are a result of those "nerds" doing standardization work; in particular, IETF and the RFCs.  Rather, you're just complaining that the devs don't bother to provide you with an uniform User Experience you have grown to expect, across all the variants.  That is not standardization, it is complaining that nobody herds the cats.)

(Also, while I was tempted to write "Users just do not matter" above, that is not true either.  They do matter to the developers who have users who pay them to do that work.  The kernel developers also know that without userspace, the kernel is useless, so the userspace is definitely important.  That has lead to pretty strict enforcement on backwards compatibility in the binary userspace-kernel interface, as well as on things like /proc and /sys pseudofiles; and in general, the idea that kernel changes must not break userspace.  Those are surprisingly hard rules.  Now, the issue with ZFS is that it isn't userspace, and any accommodation kernel developers make to let ZFS work within the Linux kernel is non-reciprocal with the onus on the Linux kernel developers only, and that flies against the idea behind the GPL license they use.  The BSD variants, with their permissive licensing, are not nearly as interested in reciprocality, which means that community works with one-sided ZFS developers much better.  It is funny to see how rare it is for anyone to make the most rational suggestion, which is dual-licensing the ZFS codebase to GPL-2. Somehow, it's always the "Linux nerds" that need to bow down and change.)

I don't care for getting to read the code that I don't even understand I just want the damn thing to work

Yup; free/libre/open source is clearly not for you.  Nothing wrong in that.  You get more shit done with commercial proprietary software, and that's that.

Yet, that's not universal.  I'm in the completely opposite boat.  It is trivial for me to fix and change things I don't like, so working with Linux to me is like being a kid in a candy store, or a mechanic who is given a full fledged machine shop or two for free, and given a free reign to do whatever they want in there.

The way I see things, is that the demands, elsewhere (but including in this thread), that Linux must become this or that to gain desktop market share, or the developers must do this or that because X, is like claiming that privately-owned machine shops must all be completely automated because I don't know how to operate a manual Bridgeport mill.

As to FreeBSD and OpenBSD, I do recommend taking a look.  Monoculture is dull and uninspiring, and variety always helps; and the differences may give you new ideas on how to solve your problems; similar to how learning completely different programming languages helps you write better code in any of them.  If you can afford the maintenance effort, you can even use the variety as a sort of a security barrier, so that any security breach would only affect a portion of your servers.

They are just frigging tools, not your family members.  Don't get angry when someone uses a different tool, or because you don't have the time to learn to use that nice free tool yourself and everybody else seems to be having fun with them. Only get angry when people try to use the wrong tool for the job and expect others to clean up their mess.

[RoGeorge]

I feel guilty for all the discord.  It was not my intention.  Maybe the word 'ditching' in the title of the topic was not a good idea.  My bad, sorry.  Title changed.

- for the external storage,  decided to keep the ZFS.  After all, my ZFS will be used only rarely, almost like a write only.  The motherboard has a nice feature, it can disconnect 2 hard disks (from BIOS) by powering them down (cutting the +5/+12V).  My external storage disk are only rarely powered up.  There is no better protection than an air-gap separation.  Therefore, a v5 kernel and ZFS will not be a problem.  If it were to reboot in order to power-up the storage disks, then I can reboot into a v4 kernel.

- for the OS, will keep Ubuntu.  Fedora is very nice, too, but it's moving too fast (i.e. in 2 weeks Fedora updated 3 minor version for the kernel, Ubuntu has a ZFS package in repository, while Fedora doesn't, because Fedora is moving too fast, small details like that).

- for a Hypervisor, it was between Xen and ProxMox.  Probably neither.  For now, I'll just keep a bare metal install of Ubuntu Workstation, and use KVM.  After all, ProxMox is just a minimal Debian with KVM on top, and a nice web interface for remote administration.  Will see.  The main reason to have a hypervisor would have been to have a gaming Windows 10 machine, but then I will contradict my main principle, the air-gap separation.  If it will be to need a Win10 for gaming, then I'll power down all the internal disks, and install a bare metal Windows on an USB disk.  For anything other than gaming, Wine will do it, or a Windows VM in Ubuntu, at most.

Installed on the SSD, Ubuntu 18.10 boots up in about 15 seconds, 20 if you count the POST and the BIOS splash screen, too. 


Thank you all.

One more thing:  Remember the complains about Linux being unstable, and sometimes freezing or crashing apparently with no reason?

I think this is why:  All the tests and all the Linux installs were made on a 15 years old HDD.



With the current SSD install, all works great.  So far, no OS freezing and no crash reports.  Will keep an eye on that.

About the 4K monitor scaling, there is no need for it.  It can scale, but then the fonts rendering will become foggy, like in Windows.  There is a setting in the dconf, where the fonts can be magnified at any scale, integer or float.  This Gnome magnification will render all the fonts crystal clear.  Much better than monitor scaling.

[RoGeorge]

I was fiddling with the next step, virtualization and type 1 hypervisors, when I bumped into this:  QubesOS



It is pretty close from what I was aiming for, except Qubes OS is doing that at a professional level, upto the point where their OS is good to use for journalist, sysadmins or other people actively targeted by crackers.

Pros:
- very easy installer, no need to fiddle with the command line
- everything is configured and ready to use
- based on Xen
- dom0 is Fedora
- it has template machines, disposable machine, secured machines and vault machines (vault are also isolated from net)
- it has a dedicated firewall machine that can also isolate traffic and route it through VPN, Torr, etc. to disguise the location or to anonymize the Internet traffic
- nice GUI (Xfce), each window bar is colored accordingly:  red for disposable machines, blue for work machines, green for secure, and so on
- has protection against malicious USB devices (user confirms and decides to which machine a plugged USB will go)
- can open malicious webpages, mail attachments or PDFs into a disposable machines, then save them as a picture, thus sanitizing any possible malicious content for other unprotected users
- a secured common clipboard between machines, so one can securely copy/paste between machines with different security level
- allow to run any OS, including Windows
- can save, update or backup specified machines
- can encrypt disks
- can wipe the RAM before shutdown/reboot, so no cold RAM remanence data leaks between reboots
- can make a USB template with selected machines (e.g. for a journalist going into a difficult location)
- free as in freedom and as in beer
- etc.

Cons:
- needs VT-d/VT-x (hardware virtualization) capable processor and plenty of RAM
- a SSD is a must, since disposable machines are created and booted each time i.e. a disposable Firefox browser is opened
- no GPU passthrough out of the box, so no heavy Windows 3D gaming
- requires attention from the operator
- requires understanding of the idea of multiple machines running in the same time on the same hardware (virtualization), and a little understanding of the dataflow between the nachines and the Internet traffic, also requires understanding of what Torr or VPN can do and can not do, and so on.  Nothing sysadmin level, but requires a technically aware user in order to benefit from what Cubes OS can do.

I gave it a try for about a day, and I'm very impressed.  Rock solid, stable, has all I was needed and much more, dead simple to install and to use, no command line required.  The only thing I didn't understood was why sometimes the HDD was crunching for minutes, apparently with no reason, while I was doing nothing, i.e. just reading a webpage.

Overall, I was very, very impressed.  Everything just worked out of the box, for free and no string attached.   

[edy]

If you are concerned about security and leaving traces behind, why not just install Tails on a USB stick and make it persistent (persistent storage). Apparently Snowden used something like this. I've tried it, works great. You boot it up on your machine, runs off the USB completely (live USB OS), has all sorts of firewall and Tor-Browser and other anonymity and encryption related tools set up already:

https://tails.boum.org

As far as being an "initiated nerd", I agree there takes some effort to learn Linux, no doubt. However this would also apply to Windows if it weren't already pre-installed on almost every PC you buy and you have been using it for decades. Let's face it, if I gave someone a bare-bones hardware with nothing and told them to install Windows 10 on it, they would probably also stare back at you with a blank look on their face!

Even with Windows you need to go download a Win10 ISO and burn it to a DVD or to a USB stick. What machine are you doing this on? What software do you need? How do you go about doing it? Yes most people will have no clue. What about booting it? Changing BIOS settings if secure boot is on, or if the DVD or USB doesn't have boot priority or is even in the list (some BIOSes have strange menus and sometimes need other workarounds). Anyways my point is that if most people had to do that to use Windows they would also be having trouble.

Because Linux needs an effort and some knowledge to get installed and set up it does require "initiative" but it is not only in the realm or domain of the "initiated". I have found modern Linux distros to be quite user friendly when it comes to install and use. You can be a "light" Linux user without getting under the hood and still be very productive.