sh is for shell.

If you want to control users, don't give them admin privileges.

Most of things you enumerated solve windows specific problems and therefore have no analogs in other OSes.

Use vanilla Debian. It is well suited for that purposes and it is great in terms of long time support: stable distro updates almost never break anything and upgrading to new release is possible and relatively simple. Don't listen to those recommending Arch or Fedora, upgrading them is a pain especially when you have to support many servers.

If you want something more lightweight, you may try Alpine. It is also a distro of choice for docker containers. However I'd prefer Debian for the host.

I agree that autocrap is the worst build system in use now. However writing plain Makefiles is not an option for projects that are more complex than hello world. It is very difficult to write them portably (between various OSes, compilers and make implementations) and to support cross compiling. That's why developers used to write configure scripts that evolved to autocrap.

Happily we have better alternatives like cmake and meson (I personally prefer cmake and don't like meson, but it is also a good build system solving the complexity problem).

Look at what libs zstd is linked to. You'll be surprised.

In Debian and, probably, Ubuntu you may install the wine-binfmt package to get all *.exes running with wine automatically. However I don't recommend doing so because it is very easy to run some windows trojan with this.

104 contributions in last year on codeberg, 52 contributions on github (some are duplicated from codeberg due to mirroring), some more in other places.

You can host your project anywhere you want, setup mirroring to github and drop a link in its description. So you'll have github visibility and won't depend on github. Addiitional repo backup is a bonus.

I wonder if Matt calculated CVSS score before calling this vulnerability "critical".

TL;DR: rm calls the unlink syscall and the author wasted a lot of time to find this out and even more time to describe this.

Reinstall? Why?

Create a separate partition for /home and don't format it when reinstalling, so you will keep all your stuff.

man ssh_config