Tell me about it…

The only reason I might, in the distant future, ever consider changing again is this project, which hopefully would be something between NixOS and Qubes. But that is far in the future and not even that certain.

When you set a FF profile there is a key called bookmarks. You can set them there:

programs.firefox = {
  enable = true;
  extensions = [
    pkgs.nur.repos.rycee.firefox-addons.vimium
    ...
  ];
  profiles = {
    my-profile = {
      name = "yourname";
      settings = {};
      bookmarks = [
         {
           name = "This is a folder";
           toolbar = true;
           bookmarks = [
             {
               name = "You can nest folders";
               bookmarks = [
                 {
                   name = "This is a lemmy bookmark";
                   keyword = "lemmy";
                   url = "https://lemmy.ml/";
                 }
            ...
        ];
      ];
    };
  };
};

You can always look at the home manager reference, I usually look here.

The stable setup on the laptop you can get by using a DE like Gnome that comes with batteries included. If you go for more minimal setups like a window manager it will take quite a bit longer. NixOS as a distribution is pretty easy to get running, if you are familiar with the desktop environment that you install in your system getting it setup is much much simpler than doing so in other distros like Arch, since it usually consists of adding a line like desktopEnvironment.gnome.enable = true to your config and the system takes care of almost everything. I even think that gnome gets installed by default on the first run.

Everything NixOS (https://nixos.org) does. I am 99% sure that if anyone tries it out and gets comfortable with it they will never change again.

• Your configuration is written in code, it is therefore persistent. Do you know that annoying feeling of “oh shit, how did I configure x program that I want to install on this other machine”? Never again.
• You can wipe your machine and recover your config in no time. I have 3 machines working with the same config except for small variations. If I change the command to take a screenshot it changes in all of them. If I change my firefox bookmarks it is persisted accross them too. Its awesome.
• NixOS generates revisions of your config automatically. Ifyou change something and it breaks you can always use a previous version of your system that you know works to fix it.
• The Nix package repository is the largest (by far) in all the linux ecosystem. And, even if a package you want is missing, adding it yourself is not that hard.

I am probably missing other nice things, but those are awesome already. It’s true that the learning curve it a bit steeper than usual, but there is no distro quite like it and even for non coders you can get a lot out of it.

Pashang!

No problem for the questions, happy to help where I can, I’ll do my best answering them :)

When it comes to the separation between OSX/Windows and linux I believe the most important bit is where the trust is placed. For the proprietary ones you have to trust what the companies tell you, for linux/BSD and other free software you can look at the code or trust that other people have done that if you can’t. Is not that linux devs are more trustworthy than Microsoft/Apple devs, is that they don’t need to be. So yeah, kind of only because of the open source nature of it. In relation to firewalls and security, there are plenty of options to install on linux, open and closed source. But you will have to do that yourself.

On the matter of security itself its important to differentiate between the OS security and the software that you run. The security of your browser doesn’t depend on whether it runs on linux or windows, but on the browser itself and what you do with it. So shoping on linux, since you do it from the browser, is in principle equal independentely of OS. For the OS itself, not only its as safe, but in cases like QubesOS, it’s generally agreed upon that is degrees of magnitude safer. And in other cases it mostly comes down to your usage of the computer and what security meassures you add to it. The difference is that in Linux you get to decide which are those.

On the topic of downloading OS images, most of them have cryptographic signatures that will allow you to verify that you downloaded the real thing. People that know how computers and the internet work underneath tend to be paranoid as well so there are verified methods to be PRETTY sure about these things.

I hope I helped clarify a bit, but as you can see there is a world of depth to these topics and we are only scratching the surface here. I strongly encourage everyone to give it a try, there are lots of resources online that can help you get a pretty good understanding without needing to know code.

Wow! Kudos on just jumping to it haha!

You probably want to just delete everything in the hard drive and NOT partition manually unless you know what you are doing. The other problem seems like a specific problem the installer ran into when partitioning the druve, are you still getting it? Asking because you posted a while ago, but I can help you fix it in like an hour.

Librewolf comes ublock out of the box, yes.

Regarding security it is a bit of a broad question, but it more often than not comes down to software update frecuency. Being based on Ubuntu, one of the most heavily supported distros, updates should come quite often. Therefore I don’t think security is a problem in this case. If you are going to move often with the laptop you might want to ensure the hard drive is encrypted, but that should be straight forward to do. I can look for some resources if anyone is interested in giving it a try.

The laptop choking doesn’t have to do only firefox, Windows runs a crapton of stuff on the background that is not trivial to control. If the intention of the laptop is to complete assignments and you only need a browser and some text editing software, you could go for some lightweight linux distro. Something like Lubuntu is really easy to install, will suport almost any software you require and its super lightweght.

Getting to the browser I’d recomend Librewolf too since its a fork of Forefox with less bloat and works great out of the box. Being based on FF it will feel familiar.

Moving to linux might sound scary at first, but its way easier than it looks and its well worth the effort.