I've tried Mint on a live CD and it comes way too bloated for my taste, too many media related software that I don't need for this purpose. A basic text editor, a spreadsheet editor, and basic dependencies to compile Bitcoin Core as well as Tor should be it. Im either going to use Xubuntu or try the latest Debian release. Seems pretty easy to install nowadays compared to back then. Does anyone here use that distro at all? It comes with a full disk encryption setting on the wizard.
I'll try automatic partition setting and just encrypt the whole thing. Im not sure if it encrypts the boot partition too, but I want it to encrypt for sure swap and home. Some people don't realize these may remain unencrypted and leak your data on there.
In that case, use Debian and then replace the default GNOME desktop with an XFCE desktop.
You don't need to encrypt the boot partition, it has no data of interest to inspectors except for maybe your kernel version and the name of the operating system(s) you are booting.
I would argue it's good to learn to use the command line (and vi), but it comes with a steep learning curve. After that, it's much more powerful and faster than using a GUI.
Depends on what precisely you use it for. Simply editing text which could be also done using nano might be worth it, but when writing code, you have tools such as VSCode which provide another level of comfort and efficiency. Even better if you install the
vim plugin and gain the advantages of vim, including VSCode's.
vim is not so bad since I already know how to use it, but to this day I still find nano convoluted to use (and don't get me started on C-X C-C emacs).