Yeah, that despicable russophobia that makes us brain-washed russophobes hallucinate how Russia is invading neighbouring countries while committing war crimes, attacking other countries’ IT infrastructure, commiting sabotage and flooding social media with propaganda 24/7 for years… 🤡
It’s been years since I took a look at this but I vaguely remember a handy kioskrc config file under xfce4…
That sounds like the non-techies would be able to fix it themselves on Windows without you being around, which in my experince isn’t the case.
It might be different for you with a lot of tech-affine people in your family. But for those of us being forced to be the tech support anyway, it can really make a difference if you have to fix a Linux issue once in a while or have to reinstall Windows for the 5th time this year…
ARM is shit at hardware discovery in general. So no, chromebooks don’t need a special distro. They however need a kernel adapted to the specific hardware, often down to the model (that’s also the reason Android updates take so long on phones and there is very time limited support… there’s always someone needed to adapt new updates to the specific hardware for each device, so they don’t bother for anything but their latest products).
Decryption isn’t a problem if you use the systemd hooks when creating your initrams. They try to decrypt every given luks volume with the first key provided and only ask for additional keys if that fails.
I have 3 disks in a btrfs raid setup, 4 partitions (1 for the raid setup on each, plus a swap partition on the biggest disk), all encrypted with the same password.
No script needed, just add rd.luks.name=<UUID1>=cryptroot1 rd.luks.name=<UUID2>=cryptroot2 rd.luks.name=<UUID3>=cryptroot3 rd.luks.name=<UUID4>=cryptswap to your kernel parameters and unlock all 4 with one password at boot.
Stick to a specific distro and train your staff
Linux is Linux. Train your staff to properly use one and they can use them all. “Distro” is just a fancy word for “which package manager and update cycle to we chose and what logo do we put on our pre-installed wallpaper”.
Yes, I actually just use Wine with a default prefix and pray it works. If it doesn’t (rarely) then the game gets his own prefix to tweak the settings.
you didn’t say what file system your /boot partition was using, so I don’t want to guess
It’s actually easy to guess. There is exactly one filesystem UEFI has to support by its specification, everything else is optional… so unless you produce for Apple -because they demand apfs support for their hardware- no vendor actually cares to implement anything but FAT.
When you say system drive this will also have your efi system partition (usually FAT-formated as that’s the only standard all UEFI implementations support), maybe also a swap partition (if not using a swap file instead) etc… so it’s not just copiying the btrfs partition your system sits on.
Yes clonezilla will keep the same UUID when cloning (and I assume your fstab properly uses UUIDs to identify drivees). In fact clonezilla uses different tools depending on filesystem and data… on the lowest level (so for example on unlocked encrypted data it can’t handle otherwise) clonezilla is really just using dd to clone everything. So cloning your disk with clonezilla, then later expanding the btrfs partition to use up the free space works is an option
But on the other hand just creating a few new partitions, then copying all data might be faster. And editing /etc/fstab with the new UUIDs while keeping everything else is no rocket science either.
The best thing: Just pick a method and do it. It’s not like you can screw up it up as long if your are not stupid and accidently clone your empty new drive to your old one instead…
misinformation != desinformation
Both exist plenty…
Btrfs can mostly fo everything you would normaly use LVN or raid for natively.
Btrfs raid0 lets you combine any number of differently sized drives into one (just without the speed boost of traditional raid0 because with flexible drive sizes data is not symmetrical striped). And btrfs raid1 keeps every data duplicated, again with flexible number and sizes of drive (also with metadata on every drive).
The sytemd hooks (instead of the traditional busybox ones) then manage the one other task you use LVM for: unlocking multiple partitons (for example multiple raid partitons and swap) with just one password. Because the systemd encrypt function tries unlooking all luks partitions it finds with the first password provided and only asks for passwords for each partition if that doesn’t work.
PS: btrfs subvolumes are already flexible in size and don’t need predefined sizes. So the only things that need to be created separately are non-btrfs stuff like the efi system partition or a physical swap (which you can also skip by using a swap file instead of a partition).
BTRFS raid on LUKS-encrypted devices (no LVM, all unlocked with one password via SystemD encrypt hooks).
The main trash you accumulate are config files in you home directory because they stay after the package is uninstalled. And they just sit there not hurting anybody.
Which is a good point to remind people to install pacman-contrib and make running pacdiff regularly a habit…
Which btw is the reason many people ended up with Archlinux… after the x-th time looking up some configuration issues on another distro and landing there.
I think it’s not a newbie but a general user issue. I have learned to recognize the linux newbies for whom Arch is a good fit over time… just by watching which people distro hop until landing with Archlinux.
PS: And among the typical distro hoppers is really a big chunk of them… because for a lot of them distro hopping is just a symptom of wanting to make the mandatory big system upgrades every few years at best worth it by trying something new. Those should actually get a rolling distro as a recommendation much earlier.
Yes, you are missing the fact that it’s mostly not people making Archlinux their personality, but people making meme’ing about “Archlinux users” their personality. For the vast majority it’s just an OS.
Ventoy and…
Clonezilla, (custom) ArchISO, Tails
the stuff you might need to safe other people’s PCs sigh …
HBCD_PE, Windows 11
If I hadn’t included those in my ArchISO already I would probably add…
one of the usual Rescue ISOs, GParted Live.
Bonus points for Ventoy’s ISO partiiton doubling as simple storage.
PS: Thanks for the reminder to update some of them again.
Dual booting with Windows is always a pain, because Windows likes to nuke and replace your boot menu. The safest bet is keep Windows strictly separated: You create a 2nd efi system partition on your second drive with linux, use a boot loader there and then set everything up to start that as default. And then you configure the boot loader to chainload windows from it’s own ESP on disk one. This way Windows is oblivious about linux systems it might try to damage. And you can then set the boot loader menu to a default or to default to the last system booted. (2 separate ESPs on on disk might work, but that is not supported by UEFI, so it depends on your hardware’s implementation if they are recognized or if it just stops after having found the first…).
I would assume what you did was install the Linux boot loader (efi file) as the default like removable drives do (so grub’s efi file installed as esp/EFI/BOOT/BOOT64.efi which is the default for removably drives to take priority; done via grub-install with the --removable flag, some installations might use this by default…)
I never really understood that concept that questioning your own sanity is actually a good sign…
…but then I experienced Russian propaganda victims and their steadfast and unwavering believe that contrary to reality absolutely everyone except themselves is mislead and brain-washed by desinformation. 😄