Fair…

PS: Wait… that’s a hobby and they don’t get paid for lying? That’s even worse than I thought.

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Removed by mod

It’s been years since I took a look at this but I vaguely remember a handy kioskrc config file under xfce4…

found it…

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…

You could…

But then one is an open system where you can disable the UI put on top and have a working linux system, while the other is a closed blob destroying compatibility and trying hard to lock you out from accessing the underlying linux system.

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.

It has lots of small issues that add up to a frustrating experience for mainstream users.

And 90%⁽¹⁾ those are out of Linux’ actual resposibility because they are caused by third parties screwing up… sometimes even intentional (from companies producing lackluster drivers only having a fix cobbled together for Windows specifically -looking at Realtek networking for example- to ones actually going out of their way to block Linux (MS FUD included…).

⁽¹⁾ The other 10% exist on Windows or Mac also, but people just accept them because they are used to not having a chance to change it. Seriously the amount of obscure regedits or third party tools usually surpass the number of linux issues fixed by editing an easy to read txt file.

Linux is Linux.

We should send all those people, pages and guides suggesting distros to hell.

And then instead we suggest update-schemes (fixed, rolling, slow-roll), package managers and Desktop environments. People with enough brain cells to start a computer are then absolutely able to chose a distro fitting them based on that. Everything else coming with a distro is just themeing/branding anyway…

(and just for the use statistic: Archlinux, Opensuse (Leap and Kalpa), Debian here…)

I’ve been using Arch and Manjaro for couple years each and in my experience they both break regularly. But, for some weird reason, Arch Linux is praised, when Manjaro is shamed upon.

No, there is not some weird reason but actual very good ones.

Things can break on a bleeding edge update scheme. That’s to be expected from time to time. But the questions are “why did it break” and “what is done to fix it”.

If something breaks on Archlinux it’s because of some new package with a issue that escaped testing. Then the fix come out as fast as possible (often within minutes even, but let’s assume hours as those things need to move through mirrors first…).

If something breaks on Manjaro it’s either because of the exact same reason as above, but 2 weeks later. Because Manjaro keeps back updates for two weeks “for stability reasons”, yet doesn’t do anything in those 2 weeks. So they just add the same problem later, completely defeating the argumant about stability. Oh, and fixes are of course kept back for 2 weeks, too, because… reasons.

Or it breaks because they fucked up their internal QA. For example by letting their certificates expire again and again and again and again… of by screwing up their very own pacman-wrapper and then ddos’ing the AUR for all users, not only Manjaro ones.

Or -speaking about the AUR- it breaks because they give their users full access to the Arch User Repository (without any warnings about user content being less reliable and used at your own risk) pre-installed. Also they do it on a system generally out-of-date because it lags 2 weeks behind. Which is not what AUR packages are build for (they assume up-to-date systems) and is a straight path to dependency hell and breakings… not because something went wrong but because the whole concept of an out-of-date system not running their own also 2-weeks behind version onf the AUR is idiotic. On the “plus” side they have an easy fix: blame the user, because he should obviously know that an pre-installed part of Manjaro is conceptionally flawed and shouldn’t be trusted.

Right decision but for the wrong reason.

There is a difference here.

Unlocking home later in the boot process is not a problem, so the you can indeed have a keyfile on your root and get your home unlocked and mounted after root is done.

Swap however needs to be available early, at least if you want to use it for hibernation.

This would -at least as far as I understand it- limit your swap’s functionality for hibernation etc. Because there your swap needs to be available early. You can still do it in theory, but the key file then would need to be included in you initrams, which kind of defeats the purpose.

There is however a much more easier option: either use LVM on luks (so the volume is decrypted with the password and then contains both, root and swap) or just use the same password for root and swap while switching over to the systemd hooks (as those encryption hooks try unlokcing everything with the first provided password by default, and only ask for additional password if this fails).

EDIT: Seeing that you crossposted this from an archlinux-specific community: You can find the guide here. It’s for using a fully enrcypted system with grub as bootloader, but the details (in 8.3 and 8.4) are true for all boot methods. Replace the busybox hooks with their systemd equivalents (in minitcpio.conf for archlinux but again this isn’t limited to that init system), then add “rd.luks.name=<your swap’s uuid=swap” to your kernel parameters and also replace the “cryptdevice=UUID=<your root’s uuid>:root” that should already be there for an encrypted system (that’s the syntax for the busybox hook) with “rd.luks.name=<your root’s uuid>=root”. On startup you will be asked for your password as usual, but then both root and swap will be decrypted with it (PS: the sd-encrypt hook only tries this once… so if you screw up and misstype your password on the first try, you will then have to type it again two times, once for root, once for swap…)

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…