RAID 5/6 is somewhat broken, and some people might consider the lack of built in encryption or support for a cache disk as problems. For some reason it seems popular to blame it for data loss.
That being said, it is my favorite file system and I never had problems with data loss, but I use ECC RAM on my desktop as is strongly recommended if you use btrfs or zfs (another potential downside).
I don't know of one, but why not install gnome on Mint (or Debian)?
I exclusively use podman instead of docker at work and at home and haven't encountered any unsolvable problems.
I genuinely don't know if scratch is the right choice or a simple text based language would be better, especially for the older kids. Just from my personal experience, I started programming in BASIC at 12 and don't think I would have had as much fun and continued programming if i had used scratch instead.
You don't even need to look at the extension to identify most file formats, as there are unique magic numbers stored at the beginning of most (binary) formats. Only when a single binary format is reused to appear as two different formats to the user, e.g. zip and cbz are extensions relevant. This is how the file command and most (?) Linux file explorers identify files, and why file extensions are traditionally largely irrelevant on Linux/Unix.
This means your idea of suggesting software based on the file type is even more practicable than you described.
It should be possible using the address overlay in the app. Otherwise you could leave a note or use the web based editor on the OSM homepage.
Keeping the details about vim in the extras is what I would do as well, but I would definitely tell the students that vim and vi exist, because they are the only editors available on many systems.
I would consider that ifconfig is deprecated on many distros and would therefore teach about iproute2 (mostly the ip and ss commands) instead. Additionally I would consider editing files essential, even if it is with nano.
Maybe mention more modern and simpler help tools like tldr, as they could be even more useful to beginners.
To introduce the shell and utilities, I would try to find a somewhat realistic use case that combines multiple aspects, like analyzing some files or spellchecking instead of simply mentioning every feature one by one.
I find that S-expressions are the best syntax for programming languages. And in general infix operators are inferior to either prefix or postfix notation.
Why not write your own version? Getting the temperatures is easy and portable with the sensors command from lm-sensors. The rest of the info is easy to get using various commands (e.g. uptime, free) combined with a bit of sed/grep/awk for formatting.
I find it interesting how large the difference between tastes regarding music players is. After the development of Cantata ceased, I was unable to find any mpd client that I liked and decided to write my own instead (if anyone is interested, the code is available at https://github.com/dokutan/cmpdc)
Easyeffects is great, or use the eq built in to pipewire to avoid an additional dependency: wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#Systemwide_parametric_equalization