NMGLUGers, We had a small meeting last night, I missed reading these emails till today; I did not see an attachment from Art, but he was at the virtual meeting. In a nod to freedom, we did mention that a certain corporate hardware could use a Linux OS, but he demurred. Although too small to be statistically significant those present were more likely to use bash than any of the other shells. As bash is still the default shell it just makes sense for most users to start there.
As for distros - well there is lots of choice. I still prefer the "Ubuntu, based on Debian" combination. This unit is Debian Stretch (9.13), but not my most recent install. When introducing others to Gnu/Linux I like to be able to present a menu driven desktop experience.
I have a mixed use on Firefox - where FirefoxESR is on this 32-bit machine, but on my daily use, Xubuntu 21.04 install I have Web/epiphpany-browser from the GNU Project. This keeps me closer to the principles of freedom and support for FSF, at least I hope so. I am getting used to Web, and learning how to manage the sandboxing and clearing the history and cookies. I was mostly disappointed with the gui settings of the new Firefox. Mozilla has an active vision for the web, but it just went in a direction that my user habits didn't grasp. We will have to see how this pans out in the next few months.
Have a good couple of weeks. Do check out the news on Free software and the Free Software Foundation.
Thank you, Ted P.