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Comment by sandreas | Hacker News Reader

I think Aurora Linux[1] is more suitable for this purpose.

However, while I love the approach of having an immutable distribution, I don't see the attack vector of ransomware handled in a good way. It does not help, if your OS is intact, but your data is irrecoverably lost due to a wrong click in the wrong browser on your system.

I think the backup and restore landscape has enough tools to fix this (cloud + restic[2] or automated ZFS snapshots[3]), but it takes a bit time / a script to setup something like this for your parents in your favorite distro.

1: https://getaurora.dev/en

2: https://github.com/restic/restic

3: https://zrepl.github.io/

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I mean, nothing stops you from building your image of KDE Linux (or any immutable distro) with a built-in restic config.

This is more about preventing the user from messing up their computer than it is about data safety.

I've been using Bazzite for 2 years now (an immutable distro based on Fedora Silver blue) and I just love the fact that I can "unlock" the immutability to try something that could mess up my systemd or desktop environment, and I can just reboot to erase it all away.

I also have a github action to build my custom image with the packages I want, and the configuration I want.

And this makes adding a backup setup even easier, it can be baked-in the distro easily with a custom image ! Your grandparents don't have to do anything, it will auto update and auto apply (and even rollback to the n-1 build if it fails to boot)

> I mean, nothing stops you from building your image of KDE Linux (or any immutable distro) with a built-in restic config.

I hear you. The problem is, that basically nothing stops you from building anything yourself. The difference is, that there is no easy-to-use build-in solution (like time machine) and ease of use is what makes the difference. Especially a TIME difference. Of course there is software SIMILAR to time machine, but it seems to be hard to write something rock solid and easy-to-use.

In fact I also have built it myself: https://github.com/sandreas/zarch A script that installs Arch on ZFS with ZFSBootMenu and preconfigurable "profiles" which packages and aurs to use. Support for CachyOS Kernel with integrated ZFS is on my list.

I already thought putting together a Raspberry PI Image that uses SSH to PULL backups over the network from preconfigured hosts with preconfigured root public keys and is easily configurable via terminalUI, but I did not find the time yet :-) Maybe syncthing just is enough...

> nothing stops you from building your image of KDE Linux

Isn't the main point that you delegate curating and building the system image to the KDE project?

No, the main point is they provide a reference image using mkosi, and you can clone kde-linux and trivially make spins. At some point I expect just about everyone is gonna find a spin which scratches all their itches and which they are devoted too.

I have just checked, and Aurora Linux does not offer support for any Nvidia card older than 16xx.

Looks like they used to, so they have removed the option.

Strange since Bazzite still has 900&1000 driver options.

Building your own is an option https://github.com/ublue-os/image-template

I am willing to try an image officially supported but definitely I am not building my own to run a computer for my mom given that w10 supports ends, don't have the spoons nor the time for that.

But I guess it is best to have the option that not to have it.

If this is related to the split in Mesa for "Gallium" and "non-Gallium" support, you could try installing the amber branch. Older nvidia video cards are still supported that way.

However, the only distro I could find where it actually worked was Chimera. Not the gaming-related ChimeraOS but the from-scratch LLVM-compiled all-static APK and Dinit distro with a hodgepodge userland ported from the BSDs.

It's rolling release though so it'll happily install the latest bugs. But it probably does that faster than any other distro.

> However, while I love the approach of having an immutable distribution, I don't see the attack vector of ransomware handled in a good way

The phylosophy of security in "modern" OSs is to protect the OS from the user. The user is evil and, given so many rights, it will destroy the (holy) OS. And, user data ? What user data ? /s

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