Though I think I kinda got the gist of your insinuation, I failed to see your point.
Offline Armory is an air-gap system implementation. Therefore, it doesn't really matter if the platform it's running on is a Schwindow, Schmac, Schlinux or whatever.
BTW, now you tell us about your easier alternative to vi after our adventure with it. Why make a peep about it now...after the fact?
He was arguably correct IMO. If I'd asked you to use the nano command instead of vi, it would've been quicker and easier. It was half linux purism on my part, but also I replied quickly from the top of my head, so I just typed out quickly what I thought of first!
Anyway, it was possible that you might not even have nano, and ALL linux has vi. So, like I said, it's arguable, one way, the other, and several other directions also...
Edit: I did try to delete the swap file with the rm command but got denied for some reason.
Likely a permissions issue. You need the chmod command for that (there is a user on bitcointalk with the username "chmod 755", likely a tribute to how often that command will help you out of a tight corner). Possibly you would need chown too, depends on what the exact problem is.
I think I had used chmod way back when ck introduced a fix to the S3 firmware (with security holes). It was just a copy and paste job though and I didn't really understand what it did. It wouldn't hurt if you kinda explain what it does for the benefit of the "whuffos" in here like me.
best place for that is the "man" page. Linux command: man chmod
I'll say what that page doesn't tell you though.
Every file and folder on Linux has Access Permissions defined for it. There are three access levels: the user level, the group level, and the others level. If you're not the user, or if your user is not in the group, or if you've not got net access to the machine containing the file/folder in question (that which defines the "others" level), then, then you cannot access that file/folder. For each level, there are 3 different types of permission; read permission, write permission and execute permission (either allowed or disallowed for each of these).
If you look through your main hard drive using a GUI file explorer, and you've got columns like "group" and "permissions" visible, you'll get a visual demonstration of the groups and users aspect; any file that's not got your username listed for either "user" or "group" will not necessarily respond to opening, saving or running (if it can be run like a program/script).
The point of all this is security. The groups and the users are assigned to the files and folders in a carefully stuctured way. This is intended to protect the most important system files and folders from access, not just from the actual legitimate users (although it feels like that's what's happening when you're noobing around...), but from hackers and malware. Or even just stopping badly written software or hardware from trying to alter something vital to the system when it shouldn't. And of course, this all means you can (and often should) set the permissions of your personal files yourself to achieve the same thing.
The "root" account is the user's way of circumventing the permissions system safely (supposedly...). The root account has access to anything and everything on that machine, and because of that, you're supposed to give it a really well chosen password. Typing su (abbreviation for "super user") or sudo (the d-o part probably abbreviates "do once") will give you either continuous or one off use of the root account (respectively). Hence the root account is frequently what you end up using, in practice, to change the permissions of files or folders you need to get access to (but can't). It's usually because you're not the user or in the right group, or because the permissions for that group are set wrong.
man chmod should tell you the rest...