Of course you cannot install Windows without getting a malware: Windows is
malware! You can consider that Microsoft (and who has enough power over
Microsoft such as governments) own all Windows systems and the data on them.
It is not hypothetical: the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY is/are known
since Windows NT4, Microsoft can remotely install whatever it wants on a
(usually specific) Windows system, it was shown that every search in
Explorer, the title of any media played on Windows Media Player, etc. is sent
to Microsoft.
Any proprietary bit potentially is malware. You are denied the right to know.
That is not acceptable. Trisquel is 100% free software.
You had better talk to your teachers, raise the ethical issue you have with
using proprietary, and ask for the permission to use equivalent free software
(LibreOffice instead pf MS Office, GNU Octave instead of MATLAB, FreeCAD or
LibreCAD, etc.) even that means a harder work. Teachers are sensible to
students who are prone to work harder.
Wifi may be problematic (but you can buy an adapter at ThinkPenguin or
Tehnoetic and be sure it will work). It depends on the chipset. You had
better try Trisquel from a Live system and see by yourself.
See https://trisquel.info/en/wiki/installation-guide and
https://trisquel.info/en/wiki/setup for installation instructions. The
installer proposes the encryption of the sole /home partition. It proposes a
reasonable partitioning schema by default but you can make opt for a manual
partitioning. Yours is reasonable as well and you can execute 'df -h' on one
of your systems to see your actual usages of the system partitions (double
these digits to be at ease). I do not see much point to have /boot separated
from / unless you want different filesystems for them. The drawback is
obvious: a bad dimensioning and you will end up with one of the two
partitions full although the other one is empty. I believe (I do not double
boot) Trisquel's install will overwrite the MBR. GRUB will therefore be
configured from Trisquel (and list all your systems: do not worry). You can
then reinstall GRUB from another installed system if you wish.
In Trisquel, you get the option to delete a bar with Alt+Right click on it.
But you may want GNOME Shell where the "Activity" view can show the icons of
frequently used programs. Maybe GDM too for a few additional functionalities
such as the ability to lock the screen. They are a few clicks away in the
"Synaptic package manager" (in the "System parameters").
The only laptops that are free down to the BIOS are sold at
http://minifree.org but if you compromise on the BIOS for more recent
hardware then get it from http://libre.thinkpenguin.com and have the
guarantee that it will perfectly work with Linux-libre hence Trisquel.
No Google DNS. Because I use
https://github.com/dillbyrne/random-agent-spoofer/releases I am not sure
whether Abrowser's default useragent identifies Trisquel. If that useragent
is the generic Firefox one, I do not think Abrowser can be set apart from the
generic Firefox. If you are really concerned about your anonymity on the Web,
you can download and use the Tor browser (that tries to be as generic as
possible to avoid fingerprinting).
