[Discuss] Nixbook Project

The Nixbook project was started as a hobby during Covid by Mike Kelly who was trying out nix and made his way to the idea that a nix backend could be behind an ultra-user-friendly distribution with some Chromebook attributes. He’s developed the distro so it self-updates perpetually with no user involvement, has a powerwash function (to completely wipe the disk of user data before giving it away), has flatpaks enabled, and offers a free App Store of flatpaks. Through trial and error (user feedback) he’s developed a system of getting used laptops given to him, installing nixbook with scripts, then giving them away on Facebook or Craigslist. He is looking for ways to get his project into institutional spaces like libraries.

I’m watching with interest and texting with Mike from time to time. I think this is a really good step forward for laptops I could feel good giving to less technical people in my real life. Also potentially saves older hardware from recycling.

This isn’t my project but my background imagination keeps looking for tweaks I can offer to Mike. I wonder if you all have ideas. I’ve installed the distro once and thought it was executed well.

https://github.com/mkellyxp/nixbook

Possibly