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I use ufw as my firewall but there is the opensnitch project which I believe is similar to Little Snitch on Mac and SimpleWall on Windows 10.
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Fusuma allows macOS like gestures for trackpads. My laptop does not support 4 finger gestures but two and three finger work fine. You can find the script for macOS like fusuma config here. It can be run in daemon mode, which can let you run it at startup.
In general, all distros are secure enough, and many have an encryption option available during installation. As for GUI's, there are multiple to choose from, but since you're coming from macOS, I'd recommend elementaryOS which has it's own UI called Pantheon which resembles the look and feel of a Mac yet its minimalist and different underneath. Also it needs a bit of tweaking for ease of use such as sideloading a flatpakref file(a reference file for installing an app using the Flatpak package management method, can be done using the flathub.org website which is the official one) so that apps can be displayed inside its app store called AppCenter. For more core files, you can use the Synaptic GUI given elementary is based on Ubuntu, it can be installed using sudo apt install synaptic in basically any Debian/Ubuntu based OS.
If you're only playing videos with it, also check out Celluloid which uses mpv as a backend. For many users, including myself, they have switched-off of VLC in favor of mpv.
Whatever you do, make sure to take into consideration that the distro doesn't particularly know it's running on a laptop enough to automatically perform power optimization for when running on battery. I recommend you look into installing a power profile manager such as TLP after getting your operating system installed. You can then tell it to use a lower-powered setting for battery, which will substantially increase your life.
If you're only playing videos with it, also check out Celluloid which uses mpv as a backend. For many users, including myself, they have switched-off of VLC in favor of mpv.
Pretty much any will do. Ubuntu a bit less. I'd suggest something like Pop_OS or Manjaro if you want to be a tiny bit more technical (it's "Arch" but without all the headaches of Arch). As for making linux as secure as possible you're going to have to do some extra things. Trim Stray's Practical Hardening Guide, RedHat's, Madaidans Insecurities (2021), and of course Arch Wiki. These guides will be good no matter what distro you use (Arch Wiki is also the go to place to get more details on most everything linux. Distros are 99% the same so don't fret about getting the right distro).
vim? emacs? There's things like vim-wiki. Personally I take notes in Markdown and use Markdown-Preview and then load my notes to GitHub so they can be accessed anywhere.
vim? emacs? There's things like vim-wiki. Personally I take notes in Markdown and use Markdown-Preview and then load my notes to GitHub so they can be accessed anywhere.