A secure work environment for crypto investment: the OS

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Here I will be blogging about quantitative methods and R programming's financial analysis capabilities to manage long-term personal crypto portfolio or crypto investment strategies. I mean investment, not day-trading or speculation. Benjamin Graham, author of celebrated book The Intellegent Investor, defines investment: An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis, promises safety of principal and an adequate return. Now that I have my recently began GPU mining profits, I feel the need of a secure, well-configured system before starting to exchange currencies. I'm going to write about actual analysis techniques after a few posts on security and privacy. See my intro post to see what topics I plan to write about. This first one is about Operating System.

I'm a newbie - suggestions, questions, discussions are much appreciated.

Why Linux?

1. Free and open source
   According to GNU website, “Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer”. We sometimes call it “libre software,” borrowing the French or Spanish word for “free” as in freedom, to show we do not mean the software is gratis. Keeping the source code closed is like providing a guest with delicious dish but not sharing the recipe lest guest can adjust ingredients and stop being slave. Microsoft privacy statement does not seem to respect user's privacy.

2. Hardware and performance
   A fresh installation of recent Windows takes up about 25 GB disk space while Ubuntu GNOME 64 bit with excellent GUI takes around 2 GB. An instance of Idle Windows uses upto 50% more RAM than that of of GUI intense Linux distro. As Windows have more strict hardware requirements, installing Ubuntu is indeed simpler. Lubuntu or text-only Linux distros run on very low hardware specs. Linux can even be installed with persistence on USB flash drive. Persistence means you any changes you make or any software you install will be stored permanently on flash drive. You plug the flash drive in any computer and begin where you left off on another computer. It's now a portable SATA like disk!

3. Stability and reliabily
   Program isn't responding is regular thing on Windows. You issue Ctrl + Alt + Del and launch task manager to kill that program, but it won't exit. Windows users better understand the sudden Do not turn of PC updates and restarts. Linux machines too get stuck, but recovery is easier. Most Linux updates don't require restart.

4. Support and security
   Among major desktop OSs, Windows is most vulnerable to malware and virus. If you can describe your problem, you should get a solution from open source community in minutes. I'm not sure if Microsoft has 24/7 support. Software integrity check and installation on Linux are just a single command thanks to package manager.

5. Other reasons
   There are many other reasons; keeping it for a later time.

Tutorial and resources

I found the YouTube playlist to be helpful:

Even someone familiar with Linux might learn something useful. http://vic.gedris.org/Manual-ShellIntro/1.2/ShellIntro.pdf is short and easy-to-digest list of commands. <command> --help, man <command> and duckduckgo.com are your friends. gpg --help for example, displays basic commands and options of PGP encryption utility GNU Privacy Guard (gpg). To see the more descriptive manual, issue man gpg. PGP and GPP difference here.

Notes

During Linux installation choose disk encryption option as well to add an extra layer of security. No one can retrieve data even if they have physical access to your encrypted disk; I will soon upload a screen shot of during the OS installation stage.