Proprietary formats are certainly an issue outside of Canada.

Most of the reason corporations/governments stick with popular proprietary formats is actually money.

Developing/investigating an open format is expensive. and then there is the problem of people who have only lived in a digital walled garden.

If you have to train all of your new employees on how to use it the cost rises exponentially.

Then you have your IT support folks who probably just got it dumped in their lap at the last second, and have no knowledge of it themselves, because training wasn’t an option due to time or money.

As a person who handled (solo help desk for that shift) the change over of a health networks electronic medical records systems, I receive no training and was told that they had consultants on hand to transfer them to - yeah well in 4 hours over 2000 calls came in. And of course I got yelled at by a dick hole boss (if your adult children won’t speak to you, and you’ve never met your grandchildren, you are the problem) about people who didn’t want to wait in line for one person to answer the phone and dropped the call.

That boss was ultimately the reason I left that company in favor of a previous employer who offered a lot less problems. Stayed there until the pandemic (hospitality IT) and its been a shit show ever since.

Ah, the animal computer books of my childhood, lol.

My parents (both in tech fields) had a library of these before they split up.

Somehow I wound up in IT as a career, no one saw that coming, I assure you /s

Kali was built out as a penetration testing distro, though it does contain some diagnostic tools.

Not a bad place to start if you’re used to Debian, but it is a rolling release so it may break unexpectedly, or have new bugs introduced with each update.

A persistent USB with just Debian could have all the same tools installed but have a longer support scope on releases so you don’t have to update daily (bleeding edge) which is nice to reduce read/writes to the flash drive it’s on.

That being said, I keep a Kali live image (persistent) but thats becauae its home - my first introduction to Linux was 5 minutes with Red Hat, but aside from a brief intro in highschool, I really started with Linux in Backtrack, offensive security’s predecessor to Kali.

Yes, I have to learn things the hard way lol.