Is there a add-on or something to store my about:config settings in cloud so when i distrohop i dont have to set it manually?

  • SikeenEnglish
    6•1 year ago

    yeah, the firefox account. it doesn’t save everything sadly:( not even close.

    you could also backup the data directly, you can find what account you’re using and where to find it in about:account

  • @[email protected]English
    4•1 year ago

    Just keep your home directory on a separate partition and then keep it when you distro hop.

    • @JubilantJaguarEnglish
      4•1 year ago

      The “just” is doing a lot of work here. This stuff really needs to be easier for ordinary users.

      • @[email protected]English
        2•1 year ago

        Compared to all the gotchas with sync in several directions learning and setting up partitioning is literally super-easy.

        • @JubilantJaguarEnglish
          -2•1 year ago

          OK if that’s your experience, but sounds like you may not be an average user. Partitioning is low-level stuff where you’re one mistake away from losing everything. Personally I have used many sync solutions but partitioning is something I leave firmly to the OS.

  • @JubilantJaguarEnglish
    4•1 year ago

    Put the changes in a user.js file in your Firefox profile directory (the same one that probably already has prefs.js and logins.js).

    Use this format (same as about:config):

    user_pref("dom.security.https_only_mode", true);
user_pref("ui.systemUsesDarkTheme", 1);

    Then sync or backup the whole directory, excluding the “cache” subdirectories to save space.

    (Pet peeve: Firefox, please use $HOME/.cache/ like every other app!)

    You might try losing everything but the .json and .sqlite files. Have not checked, but that is probably enough. Only missing paths are regenerated when you launch Firefox.

      • @JubilantJaguarEnglish
        3•1 year ago

        Thanks. This spurred some research and I decided to disable the disk cache entirely instead:

        user_pref("browser.cache.disk.enable", false);
user_pref("browser.cache.disk.smart_size.enabled", false);
user_pref("browser.cache.disk_cache_ssl", false);
user_pref("browser.cache.offline.enable", false);
user_pref("browser.cache.memory.enable", true):
user_pref("browser.cache.memory.capacity", 512000);

        Seems an easy way to avoid the SSD churn and syncing issues, since today’s fast internet connections make disk caching less useful. That may be wrong but so far it seems as fast as ever.

          • @JubilantJaguarEnglish
            2•1 year ago

            Interesting, yes. By which you mean fiddling with /etc/fstab to mount a tmpfs partition and pointing the cache directory at that ? Any pros and cons you know about?

            Anyway, after a bit of browsing I really cannot detect any performance difference since disabling caching. So seems a good deal so far. I wish Firefox had a simple on-off switch instead of needing a bunch of config tweaks to do this.

              • @JubilantJaguarEnglish
                2•1 year ago

                Thanks, useful tips.

                Sounds like a good idea to propose on https://connect.mozilla.org

                Done. 24 hours ago but still awaiting moderation! I didn’t know about this forum. Unfortunately they are obviously snowed under by feature requests, many of them unmerged duplicates. So not expecting much, alas.