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.

They have better marketing and establishing user benefit, their next project is GRID which is supposed to be for an IT admin to mass deploy software,patches and policies from a dashboard, like you do with Windows. So they will gain credit with IT pros

It is Ubuntu with some attention to the UI and UX, and just like Ubuntu the “pro” version has a price. Which you pay a premium to have things preinstalled.

The Zorin prices are donations to help pay the distro maintainers. You can choose 0 dollars, or atleast you used to be able to

That’s the fun and terrible part about Linux, too many choices :)

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)

It’s one of the reasons my distro hopping kept bringing me back to OpenSUSE. GUI system apps, and a failsafe revert with snapper rollback if you tinker too much and break stuff.

:) 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

Best thing would be for you to just search what exploits a firewall protects against because its not just open ports. I would link stuff but you are discounting what I linked earlier that Ubuntu ships with firewall off; by nature the most popular distro is less secure because of that.

So no point me wasting time if you aren’t interested in it.

Edit: sorry if tone seems bad, its not intentionally that way.

To answer all your questions I’d need some time, I’d have to go back to the 100s of hours of 2.5admins and security podcasts. But to clarify an exploit doesn’t have to be an open service especially if you aren’t running a firewall. Some bombard your network adapter into buffer overun etc, but network traffic is handled by the kernel stack. A good firewall drops packets instead of letting them all into the public interface and kernel TCP stack. Where CVE stuff can happen.

I’m not saying Linux can’t be hardened , but because it is user editable and not locked down like Mac, you have a lot of things people can alter (or not alter) by hand or packages that can leave you open.

There’s a reason we have AppArmor and SELinux, yet some don’t bother to use those tools.

There was something with discord? Discourse? screen sharing that used x11 forwarding, and was on by default. I want to say Ubuntu. When it was news I checked by SUSE install and thankfully its disabled by default. But also the reason Linux distros are moving to Wayland because X11 is a security problem.

Ubuntu ufw off by default https://documentation.ubuntu.com/server/how-to/security/firewalls/index.html

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

They are still weird

Android already had WiFi Direct, this change just brings Apple and Android into the same sharing room.

For mine, not TrueNAS, I boot to a live USB stick, so drives are not in use and do an full gparted copy to a back up drive, so it is a clone. Should the system die I swap the whole drive out.

Disable aliasing I guess, or change to root owner, read only permission

Then lock bash rc as read-only and root permission only, or disable aliasing altogether I guess

I guess that depends on distro, because sudo on OpenSUSE requires root password, so a script isn’t doing anything unless you enter the password