bizdelnick

Use bash-completion, it is much faster than clicking menus.

every distro I’ve tried has a strong sense that if you’re using the GUI you don’t need or deserve admin controls

GUI tools are not suited to be run as root in general. Few ones that are have special measures taken to prevent gaining privileges by another process, e. g. run a background non-GUI process as root and GUI communicating with it as an ordinary user. Such tools (package managers, system tweakers etc.) are usually configured to get required privileges via polkit (e. g. pkexec synaptic to run GUI package manager in Debian). Don't use sudo to run GUI programs!

You don't need to run any GUI programs as root.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/install/linux

Don't search tasks for a tool. Search a tool for your tasks.

Everything seems ok. It is unlikely that the disk itself is dying. Maybe the problem is a bad cable or bus controller. Or something is wrong with the filesystem.

It's not GTK, it's tk.

Check its SMART: smartctl -a /dev/sdb.

Software opens a symlink the same way as a regular file. The kernel reads a path stored in a symlink and then opens a file with that path (or returns a error if unable to do this for some reason). But if a program needs to perform specific actions on symlinks, it is able to check the file type and resolve symlink path.

To determine how some specific software handle symlinks, read its documentation. It may have settigs like "follow symlinks" or "don't follow symlinks".

Because nobody can be sure there are no other backdoors. And, I guess, they wanted to stop distribution of affected source code.

Nope. There were checks of build environment.

Anyway the xz backdoor was enabled only in rpm and deb packages.

Have you ever upgraded debian? If both local config and default config have changed, it suggests you review the changes and choose which config to use or merge it manually.