bmcentee148's questions

I have seen many articles and posts stating that a way to turn off the system via the terminal is issuing the shutdown -h now command. It obviously works on my system, but it shuts down everything extremely fast. If I power off the system using Ubuntu's GUI, the Ubuntu splash screen comes up, and it takes much more time before it actually powers down. By safe I am referring to a shutdown that makes sure all read/write operations are completed before powering down and avoiding data corruption.

So is using the shutdown command in the terminal actually a safe way to power off the system? If so, why does Ubuntu's shutdown menu take much longer to accomplish the same goal?

I just installed an Evernote client called Tusk via their .deb file, because the version in the official Ubuntu software repository will not play nicely when connected to my VPN. This new installation works fine with the VPN but the app icon is now simply a gear. I would like to change this but don't know how. Help would be greatly appreciated.

I have Ubuntu 18.04 and I just received a notification that I can upgrade to Pop!_OS 19.10. Why in the world would this happen? Did I break my system? Has anyone else had something similar happen?

The only thing I have installed from Pop!_OS is their icon theme. Could it be because I have their ppa on my system? How can I clear this notification and request to update?

So I've been reading into the differences between using su and sudo, and everyone seems to be in agreement that the sudo approach is safer than allowing access to the root account itself. They say that with the root account you could break your entire system with just a single command. This I understand. BUT the initial user created on the system also has access to all commands using sudo. This I can find out by running su -l. If this is the case, then I can simply run sudo <game-ending command> to ruin my system. So how is this approach better or safer then allowing me direct access to the super user account? I can run all of the same commands...

Is it because using sudo on the command line I am explicitly telling the computer I think I know what I am doing? Do they think people will forget they are under the super user account unless they explicitly say so?

People also state that if the system were compromised and entered by someone foreign, being under the root account would allow them to do terrible things to my system. But it seems to me if they already have access to my account, and know my password, they can do these same terrible things by using sudo and entering my password since they don't even need to know the super user's password. What am I not getting here?