this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2024
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Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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The main goal of the author is to explain that the best way to help a non-enthusiast use Linux, is to maintain their system for them, so they don't have to.
Use whatever distro you're most comfortable with to do so. For the author (hi!) that's NixOS. If it's Debian, Fedora, Arch, or whatever for you, it makes very little difference for the end-user, they'll see nothing of it.
Uhh that's a very unpopular approach. Nobody wants to do that.
Indeed. But someone has to maintain a system, and those of us who know what we are doing are much better equipped than those who don't.
The fact is that my family needs to use a computer. I have two options: let them try to do so on their own and deal with the fallout, or do it myself. I will choose the latter, not because I want to, but because the alternative is even worse: I can't help with systems I have no clue about, even less when it is an OS I am not familiar with.
Thus, I developed a bunch of tooling that makes it almost trivial for me to maintain linux systems for the family. 15 minutes a week on average, I can sacrifice that to make them happy.
The sentiment should rather be, that the system maintains itself. And that's actually something I would get behind.
Tinkering around is cool, but I'm in my 30s and when my girlfriend's build pipeline finishes, I'll be a father, I can't spend 4h every week fixing stuff, I need a reliable platform to work on. Currently that is indeed a mix of Debian and Nix for me.
At least the normal update process should work completely transparently for the user.
😂😂
It's not even the upgrades. Automatic, unattended upgrades have been a thing for a long while, and in general, they work remarkably well. At least in the sense that nothing "breaks": programs will still work, and start up, and all that.
But automatic upgrades can change things. Change an icon, move things around, change behaviour, introduce new features, new bugs, and so on. That is the hard part of maintenance, not the technical "go from version A.B to A.C".
Most immutable distros I've seen aim at improving the A.B->A.C upgrade scenario. They do very little, if anything at all, to keep the system familiar. Because they can't, unless they control the entire stack. And even if they do, like in the case of the proposed GNOME OS, the UI still changes - often considerably - between major versions. If I maintain a system for others, I can prepare them in advance. If they do it themselves, they do not have that luxury, they're not going to follow the development of the software they use, and I wouldn't expect them to do so either. I can do it, and I am doing it, because I'd be doing it anyway for myself.
It looks like it's for their immediate family. I had issues with this when I was supporting people I didn't live with, but if they're using the same PC, it shouldn't be an issue until something breaks.
I'm supporting three people, only one of them lives with me. My parents live in a different city, pretty far away (far enough that just randomly visiting them for in-person troubleshooting is not an option). I maintain three separate computers for them. It doesn't take much effort nowadays, because I used a system I am familiar with, a general purpose distribution, and set it up so that I can manage it remotely.
I wouldn't be able to maintain a more limited system for them, because it would lack the tools I need for remote maintenance. Hence my assertion that distributions focused entirely on non-enthusiasts are a futile attempt.