Now you got me curious, so I got up and checked:
2008 HP laptop: Appears to be a standard barrel with no center pin. (Also has yellow trim and is in-line with the cord.)
Circa 2013 HP laptop: Has the connector with the center pin. (Larger than the barrel on the 2008 model, and at right angles to the cord)
So it's era-dependent (and I used that 2008 model too long). TIL.
Hadn't heard about those, but a quick search shows those aren't standard barrel connectors, although they look similar. The Dell connectors have a third pin for data. Normal barrel connectors only have two pins.
For the OP, that means that if your laptop is a Dell from the period where they were doing this, you need a specialized cable and charger intended specifically for Dells.
Depends on the connector. "Kind of fits" and "isnt usb-c" makes me think you might be dealing with the type of barrel plug that's very common on pre-USB-C non-Macs.
Unfortunately, barrel plugs tell you zilch about the power supply they're connected to. They're a dumb connector with no data capability whatsoever, and I've seen the same size of plug on power supplies with output anywhere from 3V to 24V. You need to look for the data panel on the old power supply and make sure the new one has the same voltage, the same or larger amperage, and the same polarity.
Polarity on a barrel plug is marked by a symbol that looks like this or this. Make sure the old and new match. Nearly all barrel plug power supplies are center-positive, but better to get it right the first time and avoid any risk of damage to your laptop.
Depends on whether you're talking about additive or subtractive colour. Yellow is primary in a subtractive system, but not an additive one.
Most of its functionality is just reimplementing things that already existed, with an incompatible interface.
Exactly. It's Yet Another Privilege Escalation Vulnerability. Unless you're dealing with a multiuser machine, the attacker first needs to use some other vuln to get into an unprivileged account. Without that additional vulnerability, this exploit is useless.
I think part of what you're missing may be a set of very old assumptions about where the danger is coming from.
Linux was modeled after UNIX, and much of its core software was ported from other UNIX versions, or at least written in imitation of their utilities. UNIX was designed to be installed on large pre-Internet multi-user mainframe+dumb terminal systems in industry or post-secondary education. So there's an underlying assumption that a system is likely to have multiple human users, most of whom are not involved in maintaining the system, some of whom may be hostile to each other or to the owner of the system (think student pranks or disgruntled employees), and they all log in at once. Under those circumstances, users need to be protected from each other, and the system needs to be protected from malicious users. That's where the system of user and root passwords is coming from: it's trying to deal with an internal threat model, although separating some software into its own accounts also allows the system to be deployed against external threats. Over the years, other things have been layered on top of the base model, but if you scratch the paint off, you'll find it there underneath.
Windows, on the other hand, was built for PCs, and more or less assumes that only one user can be logged in to a machine at a time. Windows security is concerned almost entirely with external threats: viruses and other malware, remote access, etc. User-versus-user situations are a very minor concern. It's also a much more recent creation—Windows had essentially no security until the Internet had become well-established and Microsoft's poor early choices about macros and scripts came back to bite them on the buttocks.
So it isn't so much that one is more secure than the other as that they started with different threat models and come from different periods of computing history.
There's an old joke from a couple of decades ago about what operating systems would be like if they were airlines:
Linux Airlines
Disgruntled employees of all the other OS airlines decide to start their own airline. They build the planes, ticket counters, and pave the runways themselves. They charge a small fee to cover the cost of printing the ticket, but you can also download and print the ticket yourself. When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of the seat-HOWTO.html. Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plane leaves and arrives on time without a single problem, the in-flight meal is wonderful. You try to tell customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say is, “You had to do what with the seat?”
Gentoo is still very much a "You had to do what with the seat?" distro, while most others have retired that concept to varying degrees, at the cost of the seats being less easy to perform unusual adjustments on.
One detail about Rust in the kernel that often gets overlooked: the Linux kernel supports arches to which Rust has never been ported. Most of these are marginal (hppa, alpha, m68k—itanium was also on this list), but there are people out there who still use them and may be concerned about their future. As long as Rust remains in device drivers only this isn't a major issue, but if it penetrates further into the kernel, these arches will have to be desupported.
(Gentoo has a special profile "feature" called "wd40" for these arches, which is how I was aware of their lack of Rust support. It's interesting to look at the number and types of packages it masks. Lotta python there, and it looks like gnome is effectively a no-go.)
I consider bootloader attacks a very low-probability threat, and quite honestly I don't trust the average board vendor to produce anything that's actually secure anyway. If I were in the habit of carrying a laptop back and forth across international borders I might feel differently, but for a desktop stuck in a room in Canada that hardly anyone enters when I'm not present, Secure Boot is a major hassle in return for a small security gain. So I just don't bother.
sudo is already an optional component (yes, really—I don't have it installed). Don't want its attack surface? You can stick with su and its attack surface instead. Either is going to be smaller than systemd's.
systemd's feature creep is only surpassed by that of emacs.
As a Gentoo user who still compiles my own kernel for each machine, I say, Arch users have no idea what a distro that really doesn't hold your hand looks like. (Hell, even Gentoo pales in front of LFS.)