The first time I gave money to a Linux project felt weird. I'd been playing with one distro or another for a while, never quite figuring it out. Then Ubuntu Linux launched just as I started college, and because we all had bad internet, they sent me an installation disc for free.

Are you a distro hopper? Then perhaps you can help me see the appeal. To me, the fundamental properties of a system are what make it special, not the superficial changes made every few months. Perhaps I'm wrong? But here's why I think it's a waste of time.

I recently needed an encrypted container to store files on a Linux virtual machine (Debian 13 with XFCE). I didn’t want to encrypt the entire disk so that it wouldn’t take up too much space, so I decided to create a simple, encrypted container that I could mount and store important files on. Additionally, I wanted to mount it using a ready-made