The results are still useful today. There are a few basic measures of security that simply do not change and allows you to understand if your setup is secure enough to, say, run a bastion host or not
That is just a customized version of Dash to Dock. You can move the dock on the bottom if you want or make it auto hide. The same functionality you can expect from Dash to dock but with the Ubuntu theme applied
LMDE comes with some nice packages that just make your life easier. It is basically Debian but… with sane defaults