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?
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Debian (and I suppose a lot of derivatives) can use preseeding. That gives you pretty much full control to the whole installer where you can just start the installer and it does everything for you, including users, partitioning, installed software and so on.
where you can just start the installer and it does everything for you, including users,
that sounds exactly what OP does not want? especially because they still habe to wait it over until the installation completes, before they can create the users and show them around the computer
Ah, you’re correct. I somehow misunderstood the assignment, OEM installation is a bit different and I don’t think there’s a Debian version of that readily available. You could of course write scripts to manage that, but that’s a quite a bit more difficult than just set up preseed for the installer. Or you could just include instructions on how to set up your accounts afterwards, but that’s not the same either.
So like Arch Linux but for Debian
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
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ElementaryOS does it this way
Some Fedora variants do that too. Not sure which ones.
Maybe Fedora?
Dude, this is like asking “Which car manufacturer ships new cars with mirros folded?” Every driver ought to know that it’s only a matter of pressing the button and they fold. Disqualifying all those good manufacturers because they don’t fold their mirrors before shipping sounds stupid.
Same here on this topic, it’s only a matter of running one command to create the user. Options include writing the instructions down on a piece of paper before giving the computer away, or close the little gap between post-installation and setting up users by yourself.
I think they want to give away computers without user accounts already created, that’s all.
What is typically done, e.g. buying a PinePhone with PostMarketOS or refurbished setup deGoogled Murena phone, is having a default user with a well known password, e.g. 123456. AFAIR when you setup Rasbian you do have an interface to have a default user with a password.
I personally made an ISO of a configured distribution, see https://fabien.benetou.fr/Cookbook/Electronics#SocialWebXRRPi0 and that worked quite well for my use case.
Maybe Adélie but it only uses MUSL instead of glibc and is currently in beta
