I need a distro that is stable with a particular need to set up zero input automatic updates. If an update asks for a password or needs user interaction in basically any way it simply won’t get done. All he needs is a reliable platform for browsing the web. I am replacing an Ubuntu system that has apparently just stopped working (I have not had a chance to examine it yet) after years and years of not getting proper updates after he forgot his password.
Something like Bazzite is intriguing because of it’s locked down environment although he is very much not a gamer. Is there something locked down like Bazzite but with long term LTS release cycle?
It’s worth to consider that since they already used ubuntu, they might be already familiar with the gui and may feel lost if it changes
ixnay on anything but the vanillaest of the vanillas and that goes triple for bazzite and friends. you don’t want “intriguing” shit left behind to take care of pops, that’s a thing for you to play and experiment with.
your solution is already staring you in the face: the ubuntu you left behind persevered even under those circumstances. either fix it and update it or install a fresh one, with a tweak here and there. and don’t touch nothing else…
Any atomic distro + flatpak packages.
- flatpak packages.
Yay, Gramps! I got you a supply-chain exploit! Wheee!
So should they use the AUR, btw?
Atomic distros don’t support all packages, even flatpaks
I’m aure they support Firefox + email client + a few card games to spend time between sending an email and waiting a reply.
They do support these. These specific ones do work fine but others not so much. I would recommend something more closer to Ubuntu like Linux Mint
The OP’s elderly parents won’t need anything else. Have you forgotten that one of his specs is to minimize password usage and updating?
Define what you mean by “locked down”. If you don’t give your user superuser privileges, every distro is locked down because the user can only ever write to their own /home
I’d strongly recommend Mint:
- with Cinnamon DE: very Windows-esque UI
- Ubuntu / Debian-based, i.e. rock-solid, unlikely to break
- 100% automated updates (including automatic removal of old kernels so your /boot won’t get clogged
- Timeshift system snapshots in case something does break. (Note: I’ve only ever used Timeshift to un-fuck systems that I, personally, had fucked with superuser rights and manual meddling.)
Mint was going to be my suggestion too! It’s a great distro for a lot of users. Easy to navigate and hard(ish) to break.
+1, my parents are using Mint and they are only browsing the web. They have not complained anything after almost a year. In my case, I didn’t dare to set up automatic updates so I’m updating the computer when I visit them.
Same here, parents. Feel free to turn on automatic updates. It’s never broken anything, and vulnerabilities do need patching.
Seconded. Absolutely what I’d install in this kind of situation. I have an old machine set up for my wife with Mint. She only uses it to check her bank account, basically. So far zero issues.
I can also recommend Linux Mint. It’s a great general purpose option for both beginners and experienced users.
with Cinnamon DE: very Windows-esque UI
While I support the general advice, “very Windows-esque UI” is not a benefit for less tech-literate people. It’s the former Windows-users that conditioned themselves to expect Windows UI with all it’s shortcomings. The average elderly relative who doesn’t use anything but ~3 pre-installed programs does not care normally and can get much eaiser and more intutive UIs than those close to Windows.
Oh, you’d be surprised how the average elderly relative responds to the absence of a “start menu button” and total lack of desktop items on vanilla GNOME…
Debian and install the “unattended-upgrades” package.
You set it up with an email address to complain to when something fucks up and it just works.
E: no matter what you end up going with, some kind of reverse proxy or vpn will be helpful for when you need to remote in and fix something.
If you end up needing Remote Desktop and can do it, stay away from Wayland. The screen sharing situation there is confusing and annoying for seasoned users, let alone in a tech support situation.
What might be a better bet is either a windows (robust screen sharing setup) or mac (simpler interface and reliability) computer. You’re gonna be on the other end of it, so make sure to pick what you know the most deeply when it comes to remote support.
E2: another note in the vein of hated non linux oses: Those might be good because other people in the users life may be familiar with them and it won’t be such a pain when they wanna open a file or something.
I currently have an older relative using Debian/KDE with unattended-updates and few issues over the past year. Laptop was previously Windows 10, has had replacement battery and HDD->SSD swap, wouldn’t be supported by Windows 11, but is totally capable of running most modern apps.
Browsers can just be flatpak/snap/ppa and auto-update whenever, as Debian’s packaged (ESR) versions might get a bit dated.
From my own experiences with Ubuntu variants, I’ve always had some kind of issue when doing a release update, so I’ve personally stopped using it, but maybe thats just me.
Only significant issues I’ve encountered are with some flatpaks needing permission tweaks to (re-)enable printing, webcam, or filesystem access, and potentially over-doing the ad-block extensions/settings leading some sites to break - its worth setting up multiple browsers to pre-empt and work around those problems.
For remote access, it’s not a problem in my case, but you could potentially just setup a VPN with something like tailscale and just ssh over that. Once connected, I’d explore systems like VNC or KDE’s built-in remote access system. In the short/medium term, it would be easier to stick with X11 for that, but at some point, Wayland and those supporting tools are going to reach parity and distributions/desktop environments will drop X11 entirely - best to future-proof as much as you can.
For regular maintenance, it’s worth checking-in regularly to make sure the system and user is happy, and maybe setting a cron-job for house-keeping tasks (removing old kernel files and temp files, checking disk-usage/health), and having that notify you. But that probably depends how physically hands-on you’ll be.
Whichever distro you choose, you could set up SSH access for yourself to do things for them (apart from fixing most networking issues if they can’t connect to the internet ofc).
Any recommendation for handling dynamic ips for connecting these days? I used to use a dyndns client to register updates to a hostname but that was a long time ago
I also used to use the same thing. Been a long time since I’ve had to remote access someone else’s PC for troubleshooting but I think I also used TeamViewer back in the day (which I assume might not work as well on Linux anymore now that Wayland is the norm?). Perhaps you could write a quick script to get your public ip address by curling some web service that tells you your public ip address, add a desktop shortcut to that script, and over the phone tell the person to double click that desktop shortcut and read out the number they see. It’d still trip up the most tech illiterate but hopefully if they’re at the “can follow clear and basic instructions” level they can manage that. And possibly there are still dyndns clients that do that; I’ve just not messed with any of that for a long time, but you can set that up on their PC if that stuff is still around.
I was just thinking of packaged solutions/clients but yeah a script sounds good, maybe there’s packages doing the same thing but just scheduling a script every 5 min or so to detect a change and register it with a service called in curl is probably plenty for what I would need
Don’t think in terms of easy to use and unbreakable. You won’t get that because something as simple as losing icons on the desktop is the kinda thing that’ll confuse someone that’s bad with computers. Instead, think in terms of what’s going to be easy for you to fix when you inevitably have to play tech support.
I’ll second this. I’ve setup an Kubuntu PC for my parents. It’s worked really well for the past 5+ years. One thing I wish I had done was Setup remote access they can easily turn it on when they need help.
The other thing that has come up is the monitor resolution changing (ex: if they’re using a UHD TV as a monitor but I set it to 1080p to make things legible for them).
For the second, I added a bright and easily visible icon to their desktop that will run a quick script to reset their monitor resolution to 1080p.
Op should have a plan for updates and especially auto updating the browser. Some banking sites may stop working if the browser hasn’t been updated in a while.
Also do take time to explain the difference between the desktop (as part of the OS) vs things like application windows and especially the browser and where to find things they may not necessarily need that often but will be useful if you can’t remote in, like OS settings.
I installed Fedora Silverblue on my parent’s laptop almost a year ago and I haven’t had any complaints or issues.
They’re really not tech literate or heavy users so Silverblue is the perfect fit. I installed and configured Librewolf and Bitwarden for them and everything has been running fine. Everything else is vanilla Silverblue.
They don’t know or don’t care about updating software. But Silverblue does flatpak updates automatically in the background. OS and firmware updates are integrated and handled via the Gnome Software Center, so I’ll click the install button every so often when I visit. No terminal required! There is a password prompt, but at least it’s a GNOME shell password prompt, not a terminal password prompt.
Additionally, I was able to get LUKS encryption working without my parents noticing: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/encryption-advice-for-silverblue/162810/7
It’s not the most secure LUKS implementation, but I’m also not worried about state actors hacking my parent’s laptop. Originally, I skipped the disk encryption entirely because the extra password prompt made it harder to use the computer.
I use Aurora for my wife’s laptop. It, Bluefin, and Bazzite come from Silverblue.
If you want GNOME: Bluefin or Bazzite.
KDE: Aurora or Bazzite.
Like Silverblue, updates happen in the background automatically. You just have to restart the computer to pick up OS updates.
Is there something locked down like Bazzite but with long term LTS release cycle?
The only high confidence projects I know of are:
- Bluefin LTS
- Endless OS, also see its documentation
There’s also stuff like HeliumOS, stillOS and probably other images based (in)directly on RHEL Image Mode.
elementaryos is great for just this. haven’t used it in a while but i remember it being the most polished user experience on linux.
Take a look at the immutable distros like Fedora Silverblue. It would install updates automatically, and has the ability to always rollback to a working version. I haven’t used it long enough to have version upgrades tested. Perhaps it asks for user input. These upgrades happen twice a year.
If I was doing that these days with my current skills, I’d install some minimal version of Arch Linux and probably would remote into it once in a while to update, or invent some simple script to do the updates unattended. The lesser the packages the easier the whole task.
Also, don’t forget there’s Chrome OS which you can install on a regular PC. (It was called Chrome OS Flex last time I did that for a relative.) It’s the easiest I can remember right now. That’s for situations when all they need is actually just a browser. For those cases Chrome OS shines.
Also, don’t forget there’s Chrome OS
No, please forget Chrome OS. Also, I’d hesitate to call it “Linux” at this point
Haven’t used one myself for years (close to a decade). Installed it for a relative about 5 years ago, never maintained it ever since.
What’s wrong with it?
It worked pretty well on an ancient PC which was running some Windows 7 if not XP. Can’t remember really. The relative is about 80 years old, so all he needs is a browser. So, Chrome OS came naturally. The hardest part was, for some really stupid reason Google wants Google account password to be entered upon booting, and not some other password. PIN code didn’t work for us for some reason. The solution I took is we changed the password to his birthday (perhaps with some A letter, if it wants at least one letter to be present). The password included dots, which was trivial to enter with a Numpad. Like A1945.09.05. But personally, I just hate it. There are use cases when you can allow a computer to have no password. Here, Google forced us to use less secure password, out of convenience. I’d prefer to have my Google account having stronger password, and forcing no password of my computer at all. The potential security risk is someone breaking into the house, and surely they’ll be very dumb to steal that computer, to have … what? YouTube history of some old fart? But that’s a bit of a different story anyway.
Me, I’d rather go with some very minimal distro and maybe even kiosk-mode browser, if necessary.
Still, what’s wrong with ChromeOS? Did I miss something important? Beyond Google dropping ‘don’t be evil’ obviously.
Still, what’s wrong with ChromeOS? Did I miss something important? Beyond Google dropping ‘don’t be evil’ obviously.
A quick look through some of the privacy communities will give you an overall vibe on what Google is doing. But overall, they’re getting monopolistic.
They’re requiring all android developers register their identities with them or they’ll be blocked on all Google’d android versions (which almost all Android phones ship with). They’re also datamining everyone more and more each year, just like Facebook.
And they’re using their influence over Chromium to force adblock blockers into every Chromium browser. And the only non-Chromium browsers are Firefox and its derivatives
And by far the worst one, they bought out ReCaptcha and they just rolled out an update that requires verification with a device that has either iOS or stock android. It doesn’t support deGoogle’d android like GrapheneOS or LineageOS, and it doesn’t support desktop. So now any website you visit that uses the new version of ReCaptcha requires you to verify your identity with a phone, even if you’re accessing the website on desktop. This is so they can link all your systems to your identity
If you value your privacy, you should work to get your digital footprint off Google’s software as much as possible
I’ve put my dad on Bluefin (same project as Bazzite). It’s perfect. Major upgrades are the same as weekly updates. Transparent and uneventful. It’s been almost 2 years and zero major complaints. He even finally accepted to ditch his ancient MacBook Air since I installed the Affinity suite on his Linux laptop. It was his last holdover.
Fedora Atomic Distros are great. I only run into minor issues with major updates in combination with Ffmpeg Codecs layered to the install. But I guess that’s a rare usecase.
Honestly, I don’t understand whether there’s anyone who doesn’t need normal codecs. I hate this part of Fedora, as I always need to remember to install these codecs.
Take a look at the immutable distros like Fedora Silverblue
Nah. The moment they want to run a exe from a desktop shortcut (and not via rightclick on the entry in the second tab of a GUI tool) or you to run a setup script, things get messy.
I don’t know much about immutable distros, but I do know that wine installs everything in
~/.wine/drive_cand automatically places .desktop files in your desktop directory whenever you install a program that creates a desktop shortcut, all of which should work just fine on immutable distros.Except you have to run wine via distrobox or toolbox and there it behaves different. The toolbox one also has an issue with it being virtualized it seems. And forget about a runner script that prevents the integration of random .exe for security.
FydeOS might be more in line with what you need. Based on ChromeOS, but without the Google account requirements and spyware. I installed this on my dad’s PC along with setting up DNS-based Ad blocking and it’s been rock solid. If he just needs a browser, that’s basically what it is.
That’s interesting, didn’t know that existed. I know OP didn’t ask about cost but I was curious if you’ve been paying for major version upgrades or subscribing for the yearly support? According to their pricing page only minor updates would be automatic for the free installs
so you’d need to manually upgrade the system whenever you need a major OS update to be done. It doesn’t seem quite as automatic as OP was hoping for but maybe it’s not a bad tradeoff if you only need to touch it once a year or whatever the software release schedule is.
He’s been on version 22 since I set it up back it February of this year. I don’t think a new major version had come out since then. (I actually haven’t thought to check) my plan was just to do a fresh install as needed for major updates, or when his current version stops receiving security updates since new features aren’t really a concern for him.
You can check out Bluefin and Aurora, which are Bazzite without the gaming. Pick the former if they’re used to macOS, the latter if Windows.
Kinoite and Silverblue are the official spins with less bloat if you will. Either way, I’ve installed Kinoite on a few people’s computers with zero Linux experience and they’ve not had any issues besides a few minor questions that they would have on any OS.
I don’t think Kinoite and Silverblue have automatic background updates like Bluefin and Aurora do, do they?
I believe you can enable auto updates in settings
You could try Aurora, it’s made by the same people as Bazzite but with a general (or developer) focus instead of a gamer focus, and while it’s not LTS I think it updates less rapidly than Bazzite.
If your user is really tech un-savvy though, I’d just go with ChromeOS Flex. For all their (many) faults Google do at least produce a simple all-in-one experience, and I’d rather my elderly relative use Chrome’s password manager than no password manager at all.
I personally have installed Mint (Debian edition) with similar needs. Absolutely zero input might be a bit much to ask, since user should be aware of that something is going on before shutting everything down, but when that’s taken care of the unattended upgrades work just fine. Just recently I had to fix a laptop with mint to friend of a friend because upgrade was interrupted. Just running ‘dpkg --configure -a’ followed by apt upgrade and apt dist-upgrade did the job, so not big of a deal for me, but for the owner of the machine that would’ve been pretty much impossible task since they just refuse to learn even the slightest amount of their computer and have a very short temper on anything like that. And I can kind of understand that too, at least up to a point. There are things which I just can’t be arsed to learn which are equally easy to different people.
