You could just look at my profile to see that I’m not. I’m also not new to Linux communities in general. Doesn’t change that I’ve never seen someone recommend NixOS to a complete beginner. I have (rarely) seen Arch recommended, but those recommendations will generally be downvoted and have many replies disagreeing. Linux Mint is by far the distro I see most often recommended, followed by Fedora.

I’ve genuinely never seen a single person recommend NixOS to a new user, unless they already had advanced technical knowledge

I don’t think that’s a very accurate assessment at all. NixOS, VanillaOS, and Bluefin are three of the first atomic distro’s I think of and they’re all heavily aimed at developers. All of them offer features to help separate development environments, which improve reproducibility of packages and environments. I prefer the Nix approach to containers, but each one definitely offers benefits for software development.

I do software development and need a ton of tools installed that aren’t just “flatpaks”.

Every atomic distro supports distrobox and other containerization tools, and many support Nix and brew.

These distros are good for people who want to treat their desktop like a phone, but flatpak kinda lets you do that on any distro. Atomic distros are great for those who want to use tools to separate development environments for purity and tinker with the ability to easily rollback.

I agree, Mullvad is the only fork that I have confidence in the security of (ignoring Tor ofc since it’s not really for general use).

I’m not sure why you linked to this irrelevant 3 week old issue while referring to something that was fixed a year ago. Referring to it as a backdoor also implies that it was malicious, when it was simply incompetence. Have there been any security issues since? (Not trying to imply that not having any would make it safe, just wondering).

Zen is an amateur hobbyist project, expecting it to be something else is silly. It isn’t backed by a company, so you take on these risks when you use the project. The same thing goes for all community run browser forks, and unfortunately, using upstream browsers will 100% be more secure. If you don’t want to take those risks, just use Firefox (preferably hardened).

Security costs money, open source browser forks generally don’t have much of that.

Edit: I’m not trying to shit on this browser, or even say that nobody should use it. Be aware of your attack surface and know what risks you’re taking on when using any piece of software. I’m probably still going to play around with Zen, but I probably won’t be doing my banking on it.

Its not hard to copy your aliases to other machines. All my machines run NixOS, so they all have my home manager config. I would assume you could easily copy shell configs with tools like ansible as well. For aliases it’s as simple as copying your .bashrc over.

At my last job where I was regularly doing this, every user had a home directory that would be mounted onto any server we accessed, so all of us could have whatever shell customizations we’d like.

A great custom skin, and far better defaults for both privacy and speed, based on Betterfox.

The fact that a fork that simply has a better UI and default settings is gaining so much popularity shows how bad Mozilla is fumbling their product.