I’ve started to collect good computers that are stuck on Windows 10 that are being discarded. I want to put Linux on them and give them away to less fortunate people in need of a computer. It would be easier if user names and passwords were not part of the install process but part of the first boot after installation. What distros should I look at?
it would be pretty useful if we could do this with the more popular distros, but I think we may be stuck with the way where you create an admin account for yourself for maintenance, and when you give the machine to them you make a new account for them too.
but I’m curious. how will you solve keeping the system up to date? Especially the web browser, but all the other things too
Unattended-upgrades. Set it and forget it.
sure, then already open programs will start malfunctining left and right, because they assume they have x version of files and libraries on a path, but in the meantime it has been replaced with version y. firefox and thunderbird are especially sensitive to it, but are not the only one.
unattended upgrades work fine on a server with relatively simple programs, but on the desktop world things are different.
Silverblue and other distros like it fix this by not changing the running system. The pending update just becomes the running system on next boot.
yeah, but they use immutable system images that you can’t change even if you wanted to. KDE’s update system is integrated with a systemd component that does the installation after a reboot, I think nowadays that’s the best of both worlds
That isn’t entirely true. You can change it as long as it is done via package overrides or overlays. Sure it rules out just compiling/installing something into your root unless you package it first but you can change it.
I honestly like the fact that it effectively enforces every file in the immutable parts of the OS to be traceable back to some package.
ok that makes sense and if it is not too limiting, at least its a bit self documenting, you aready know what changes did you made. hmm maybe I should try it out someday on a spare laptop
Firefox hasn’t broken like that for me in years, it tells me it needs to restart because it was upgraded in the background and restores the session perfectly, usually
it tells you on a new tab. if you continue without restarting it you’ll see its already falling apart
Libraries loaded in RAM are not unloaded. They continue working just fine.
but does it load all libraries into ram at startup? there’s also all the resource files, including omni.ja that has a bunch of javascript code