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What if something happened to you? (reddthat.com)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm working through some necessary issues in VMs as I work towards dropping Windows, but it occurred to me that I should pick a distro my non-techy partner could use in the event that something catastrophic happens to me. I really like the declarative/immutable distros, but perhaps something more traditional with btrfs snapshots would be better suited to such a use case...?

It's no secret that NixOS has a steep learning curve, but do any of you share a NixOS PC with family/partners/etc.? If so, what has that experience been like? Could they take over admin if you were incapacitated?

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (3 children)

The answer depends on technical ability of your partner. In any case, they should always be able to login and extract all the data they need, so they can then reinstall, say plain Debian.

This could also be done with help from a Linux versed relative/friend. So you should leave a bit of documentation behind.

Other than that, don't optimise for the worse case scenario. It will leave you with suboptimal system most of the time.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Do you think NixOS is currently in a state where it could theoretically be set up to be "easy mode," or do you think having a prerequisite knowledge of programming is necessary to maintain it?

I'm inclined towards the latter opinion, but I don't run NixOS as a daily driver on any of my systems, so I wanted to get the opinions of people who do this on a regular basis!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I'd say if this is a concern for you (stuff continues to work if you're hit by a bus), then you should design it with that use in mind, and document it sufficiently to enable that, and also have someone else test your documentation.

My goals are to keep the setup simple and intuitive (in addition to documenting it and showing people how it works).

Hell, do some videos if you have to!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Documentation is good. I like your ideas!