Starting with the empty bar is unnecessary and very inefficient unless you are incredibly detrained. Starting Strength describes how to find your first working weights and it works well. Work up until you feel like you have to exert yourself a bit and can see either the bar speed start to slow or form errors toward the end of the set. That is your working weight. Next session move on up from there 3x5. Good form is really hard to work on if the weight is super low, i.e. an empty bar, because the movement will not be the same because it is so submaximal. Which is to say you can get away with shit form using the empty bar and wind up ingraining really bad habits that become harder to undo later.

Also, there is a lot more nuance to SS in the book than the standard template implies. The linear progression doesn't move consistently for all lifts for example. You will need to adjust programming on individual lifts independently. For instance, you very well may be able to follow a very long linear progression on the squat and deadlift with only minor adjustments to frequency for months and months on end. For the upper body lifts you will likely be adjusting to advanced novice or even intermediate programming in as soon as a few months.

As far as training variety in terms of different exercises I think the SS folks have admitted that many people fall prey to wanting to do other things. But don't overlook what the program is really for. It isn't for novelty, it is for building strength in the quickest most optimal way for the majority of people, and once the linear progression is done and over with, they explicitly tell you that you need to define your goals and make adjustments accordingly. See Andy Baker for tons of information about this, including strategies for adding bodybuilding movements.

Conditioning work is not discouraged per se but is mostly assumed that you will handle it during your sport of choice. If you truly live a predominantly sedentary lifestyle I don't think you would get push back from SS that adding some reasonable conditioning to the program is a good idea. Rip just likes to hammer in that running a half marathon before attempting a PR set of squats is going to lead to obvious problems.

Would you consider reviewing the stronger by science programs? I think there are 6 of them and the starting guide is excellent!

For me On a cut SS on maintainance or bulk SL
Because SL volume was too much for me that I felt my head was about to explode during an aggressive cut.

You know that picture is not mark rippetoe right

If I start with empty bar What do you think of finishing the main exercise with one set of machine exercise. Like after bench finish with Machine press 6-8 reps or pushups.