Patrick Volkerding must be excited to have so much renewed interest in his distribution.

Only if you run a canned, lightweight Kodi distribution like LibreElec or OpenElec. You can easily setup Kodi with Fedora for example and it will use a local non-privileged user.

How is this malware? Looks like a simple, automated SSH probe to me for people who don't follow obvious best practices. If you're going to leave SSH open to the world then do at least a few of the below:

1) Change default password
2) Enable keyauth only
3) Change the default listening port.

There's a plethora of off-the-shelf password managers out there that support encryption but you can also create an easy, DIY distributed/encrypted solution with GPG, git and vim.

There's really no excuse to be storing sensitive credentials in office documents or spreadsheets.

Besides the KDE4 debacle many years ago, KDE Plasma 5.x has seen a lot of improvement, complete rewrites in some areas and delivers a rather nice desktop experience. Being an XFCE user myself, I opt to use only KDEs windowing/compositor with XFCE to spruce it up with a more modern theme engine, appearance and 3D effects.

You can make XFCE look even better by using KWIN as the compositor

It's really come a long way in 5.x, and the themes and compositing are downright beautiful. I do feel it tries to do too much as with most current desktop environments however, or at least it's a bit too much for me. Luckily the KDE Devs made KWIN modular enough to be used with other more classic, lightweight DE's like XFCE - I prefer using KWIN compositing with XFCE. I can get all the theming, graphical enhancements and feel with the simplicity and speed of XFCE.

I've been unfortunate enough to garner a few IoT devices, including a Samsung Smart TV. With a little bit of effort and a decent Asus Router with Tomato firmware I've placed any questionable devices on isolated VLANs so they don't affect the rest of of my trusted network. I can also block or whitelist their outbound traffic if needed.

It's going to heavily depend on the functionality you need. You'd need to explain the needs and usage a bit more. Is there a reason you can't just let someone like wordpress.com run it for you? This alleviates all the headache of tracking down updates to 3rd party plugins, security errata etc. There's enough core functionality with the included plugins (they call them widgets) for most general website/CMS uses. You could try using the free option and if you want a custom domain and other stuff then pay for it.

Since others are mentioning it, on the topic of editors I prefer vim with a few plugins and tweaks.

I've been very happy with mutt with offlineimap and notmuch for many years now.

I put all my untrusted, sketchy IoT devices on their own isolated VLAN via Tomato "Shibby" firmware on an ASUS router. It's fairly trivial to do and worth the effort so they at least can't attack your internal trusted networks. You can also whitelist outbound traffic for an added level of protection.

Isn't Unity just a compiz plugin?

Wordpress.com is very different than the community wordpress.org, one is a commercial entity that offers free and paid hosted wordpress services and the latter is the upstream/open source wordpress community that offers wordpress for self-hosting.

Neither of these entities are responsible for or have any control over 3rd party plugins like the one mentioned in the article. This would be like blaming Microsoft for someone releasing Win32 shareware that hijacked credentials.

I've switched back and forth to just about every *NIX Desktop Environment since I started using Linux in 1999, loved KDE 3.x, loathed KDE 4.x until it became stable and used KDE 5.x on and off. The good thing about KDE is that the windowing and 3D effects subsystem is modular.

I'm pretty much settled on using XFCE but I'm using KWIN KDE compositing/3D effects with XFCE for a nice compromise between a 'classic' desktop that's rock solid but with the nice themes, windowing effects and features that KWIN (KDE's compositor) brings to the table.