That’s real digital minimalism! :grinning face:

In which country are you?

you can override packages (e.g. Firefox) with any Nix derivation (e.g. Google Chrome or other malware)

I see what you did there :winking face:

So yes, the choice is yours to build whatever system derivation you want, even if you shoot yourself in the foot doing so.

It was resolved after 2.5 hours. Incident Report for GitHub

Guix is fully funcitonal. Each package lists its dependencies and depends only on them. In that way, completely unrelated packages have no effect.

As for nonfree software, the Guix maintainers do not encourage it but there’s a whole channel of nonguix software.

I have Guix on one of my laptops. Currently experimenting with it. I’m not yet proficient enough to go all-in but one of these days I will.

Guix is not quick to learn either. I am fully fluent in Scheme but there are so many aspects to Guix that you need to be master before being comfortable with it that it takes time. But I see it as time well invested.

If by ‘shell scripting’ you mean bash, zsh and similar, then yes you can avoid them in Guix. It’s all in Scheme. For me that’s a huge win but YMMV.

I’m not sure I understand your security concern about Turing completeness. Many scripting languages, including bash and zsh, are Turing complete.

Arch and Guix

Buy an old Thinkpad that’s been refurbished. Something like an x250. It’ll cost you less than $200. Pick your favourite Linux distro and install it. Everything will just work. You can configure keyboard settings and shortcuts as you wish.

Battery performance will be fine but you can replace the battery if needed. Other parts are also user replacable. The one I’m typing this on has a 2TB SSD and 16GB RAM that I put in. You can also replace the keyboard if needed.

I have five of them. They’re real workhorses.