Distrowatch is a good place to get a brief overview of pretty well every Linux distribution ever made, with links and a bit of background info on each:
I know the TOR project was started by the US navy, and that now I2Pnis the preferred method of browsing the darknet, because many people believe it has been compromised.
> and that now I2Pnis the preferred method of browsing the darknet
This is not true by any means. A "switch" to I2P never happened, and just a few months ago an exploit[1] that could deanonymize eepsites was published. Tor is still the only "method of browsing the darknet"; by most definitions.
In the same manner that parts of the NSA are interested in secure cryptography as opposed to breaking it, parts of the Navy were interested in anonymizing traffic as opposed to de-anonymizing.
The TOR software is likely no more compromised than GNU/Linux generally -- the TOR _network_ is likely compromised by flooding it with honeypot servers that can track users by monitoring origins and destinations.
I can't validate if you are wrong or not. Just bring to your attention that one of their marketing slogan is "Amnesia" and "Persistent Storage on a USB stick". https://tails.net/about/index.en.html
The 'honeypot' concern is somehow valid because full-on privacy on the internet is as hard to achieve as privacy in a public park. Only its user can determine if their online activities goes against the (legal/moral/financial) interests of the most technically-advanced nation on our planet.
The Tails team made the fantastic decision of modifying the Tor Browser, giving Tails users a unique fingerprint as opposed to regular Tor Browser users.
I think that's an incorrect oversimplification. The Internet didn't grow from ARPANET like a seed grows into a tree. ARPANET didn't become bigger and bigger until it became the Internet. The Internet was the merger of many networks and many of them never communicated with any computer in ARPANET and we're developed with absolutely zero funding from the United States government.
I guess it’s a matter of interpretation. Of course every computer connected to the internet is not government-funded. But in this context we’re talking about the origin of the technology and protocols that allowed the network to exist at all. By the time the internet got bigger than ARPANet, CSNET, and NSFNET (all government funded), the protocols were pretty much settled, and that’s what everyone else’s network used to become part of the internet. If the government hadn’t gotten it to that point, there would be no internet.
In which case, it should be pretty secure.
Although, there's the obvious 'honeypot' concern.
But maybe I'm thinking of another distro, that ran from RAM and didn't write anything to disk.