take any distribution that someone at or close to the library is comfortable with, e.g popular Ubuntu or Debian,
setup a user profile that fits the need of the average library user, e.g Firefox with as a start page the library website
make sure the library card system do work
copy /home/thatuser directory somewhere, e.g /root/thatuserunmodified and insure permissions make it unmodifiable
add a cron task so that every evening 1h after the library close any thatuser session is terminated, /home/thatuser gets deleted, copy the /root/thatuserunmodified to /home/thatuser and fixer permission
assuming it’s fast enough (I bet it’s take 1min at most as /home/thatuser would be mostly empty) I’d do the process after each logout so that each new visitor gets a fresh session, no downloads from previous users, history, bookmarks, etc. Only what the library consider useful.
That’s it. This way one can still let the OS do it’s updates but the user experience is consistent.
I’ve not used either, just look on as a curious spectator, I’ve yet to leave the more idiot proof distros of mint and fedora. What makes it so hard to deal with vs nix?
If you want, here’s my config. Feel free to fork it.
github.com/harryprayiv/nix-config (you’ll have the most luck with the “plutus_vm” machine config output in my flake at first since the main output in my config is somewhat obscured by encryption).
I also have a Nix-Darwin config that I haven’t consolidated into my main one:
Which DE? With KDE I don't think I've ever had to edit a config file. I do recall that being an issue with Gnome; it's been years since I've used it though.
XFCE is really bad with this. KDE is much better, but still when setting up something a bit more complicated, you are quickly back to reading man pages. And man pages really aren’t great.
I really want to have better tiling and window management in Gnome. Ubuntu has an add-on released with 23.10 that I haven’t got around to test yet. And I know that Gnome has that feature in the works, but it annoys me that Windows 11 has better management of windows with window-snapping than my DE of choice.
The one the Gnome team is working on right now, as described here.
The basic premise of rearranging windows at an optimal size, without stretching them out to fill fractions of the screen, seems like the perfect medium between floating and tiling.
I find I have that issue in Windows 10. There’s not much consistency between applications in terms of which monitor or even desktop they’ll launch in when I open them.
Basically competent support for hardware for laptops newer than 2014. Proper thunderbolt, displaylink, trackpad, fingerprint reader, facial rec support.
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