I'm a little confused here because it seems the air-gapped device still needs an internet connection. From what you explained, it appears the main aim here is to avoid getting malware while downloading the software package, rather than actually connecting to the internet. Because even after installing the software on the air-gapped device, there should be a need for wallet setup using an internet connection, isn't there?.
This is how it works,
Have you ever heard of view only wallet ?? If yes, anyone can access a view wallet of you have the public key ... you would probably have seen a thousand worth account wallet but you will have no way to withdraw it .
Here, only the owner of the cold wallet have the access to make the transaction possible .
For example,
I will be using electrum as it has this feature, I have an airgapped device and I created a wallet in the form of cold storage, now that wallet will have it phrases that can be stored just like a standard wallet(and indeed its a standard wallet) , you would be given a public key too which can be used on your hot wallet .
The hot wallet can be created on your device that connects to the Internet now instead of a standard wallet you will be creating a
View-Only wallet which require that your public key( see this as just a mirror reflection of your wallet), most wallet do specify View-Only wallet while creating but Electrum is done in another way and I think it has been explained from one of the comments no need to dive into it again
You can use this
public key on different devices as much as you want here you can view your balance and make transactions, but this transaction needs to go through the cold wallet for signing , so anyone who literally have access to the view wallet needed to have access to the airgapped wallet to .ake the transaction works , after the signing then you can now come back to your view-only wallet to broadcast the transaction
What do you mean by better with the kernel? Are you referring to the kernel which is required for Linux OS to run or a Linux OS called Kernel? What makes you think it is better? I'm a Linux user myself but I never touch kernel for my daily usage.
I do call Linux as an OS running on Kernel so I pretty much love to call it Kernel
.
Although I haven't tried it but I believe it a much more better OS than Windows IMO