Newbie first questions

MarkoB

Hi all, newbie here. I saw lot of positives about Solus over the internet. I am planning to switch to it but first I have few questions.
I am using everything from Proton ( vpn, pass, email) and it has only apps for Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora. How to use them here? mostly asking about vpn
Browser, which one do you suggest, for security wise ?
Backup, any suggestions and should i use btrfs or not ?

Thanks 🙂

Axios

MarkoB Browsers can be open ended question
Solus supports Firefox Brave Vivaldi with security and updates so If you use
any of those you would be good. (They seem be most popular)

I stick with the ones that Solus does security updates to because they do them really quick usually.

brent

MarkoB Backup, any suggestions and should i use btrfs or not ?

Most of your questions are souls-agnostic as in purely opinion, and we all have them.
Personally I use Mullvad and Librewolf and Ungoogled but some might find then restrictive plus I have no "threat level goal" or whatever its called since I'm an ordinary user.

Use the search forum upper right for the BTRFS question. There's some good discussions on it. It's been a while since I bare-metal'd Solus. I don't even know if that option is there, vs. EXT4? I see nothing about at Solus main site.
I don't have a VPN.
Welcome, this is a solid, unique distro. Which DE did you like the most?

BuzzPCSOS

MarkoB should i use btrfs or not ?

BTRFS has many strengths and can be a powerful file system. For a newbie I would say it just adds greater complication to a platform that will have a high learning curve anyway. Also if things do go wrong BTRFS complicates recovering your files by quite a wide margin. EXT4 is a good start, play with the others when you are more familiar with Solus.

MarkoB Backup, any suggestions

Simply copying the contents of Home to an external hard drive is a good start. There are programs that can let you perform backups but I prefer the hands-on approach. If you use EXT4 file system you will be able to access all of your files from the Solus boot iso.

SethStorm666

I am using everything from Proton ( vpn, pass, email) and it has only apps for Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora. How to use them here? mostly asking about vpn

They are available as flatpaks in the software center.

MarkoB

Axios
Thanks.. Yes, I am always switching between those three 🙂 indeed, they are popular

MarkoB

brent

I mostly use a VPN as an extra layer of protection — it’s not like I’m visiting shady websites or anything like that. I only use my private laptop at home, and I keep the VPN on all the time. I just like the idea that my “online world” is mine alone, hehe. My internet provider doesn’t really need to know everything I do or everywhere I go online.
I’m currently looking for a distro I can finally stick with long-term. In the end, it’ll probably be either Debian or Solus. When it comes to desktop environments, I’m kind of torn between GNOME (simplicity, smoothness) and KDE (it’s very trendy right now). That said, I’m also seriously considering Budgie. As far as I know, the Solus dev team is behind it, so it probably gets the most love and attention there 🙂

wazjf

Proton vpn is available as a package on solus. The package name is proton-vpn-gtk-app. As for proton pass I only use the browser extension and it works fine. For proton mail, I use the website directly but if you prefer to use a mail client like Thunderbird, there is a solus package for it named protonmail-bridge.

If you want the mail app or the proton pass app, they are available as flatpak.

MarkoB

wazjf
Thanks for the reply. I don’t really feel inclined to use apps that aren’t directly from Proton. Pretty much everything I use is on Proton — all my passwords, information, photos, emails — and I don’t know, I just don’t want anyone else to have insight into that. That’s just my personal view (even though I’m probably not entirely right

MarkoB

BuzzPCSOS

Thanks! I’ve used Btrfs before, I just need a guide during installation so I don’t mess something up. And honestly, I’m a bit lazy, so this way it’s easier, hehe. My documents — basically the whole home partition — are always backed up online anyway.

What worries me the most is always the system part: what if I install something wrong and break the whole system, or if an update makes it unbootable, and things like that. That’s why I prefer Btrfs snapshots — it’s easy to roll everything back 🙂

BuzzPCSOS

MarkoB I tried BTRFS a while back and I guess we just didn't get on together. If things go wrong with the system I prefer to wipe and reinstall and make a new start. Not a problem if everything is backed up. I run an Bash install script that lets me update everything, Set up Wine, Flatpak environment and apps, install favourite software from the repository, install and configure UFW command line version, install Oracle VirtualBox and register user, enable Termald (intel processors only) and finally disable ZRAM and enable ZSWAP.
Rolling back or restoring never guarantees that the problem that caused the system failure has actually been cleared and is not still lurking in the background waiting to break things again.