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

submitted 3 months ago by Telorand@reddthat.com to c/nix@programming.dev

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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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[–] verstra@programming.dev 3 points 3 months ago

If you have a working system and no wish to ever install anything new, you could run it indefinitely.

It wouldn't get any updates after some point and after ~10 years some websites would stop working because they would be using some new standard that is not yet implemented in the browser on your machine.

To update to a newer version of NixOS, you might need to change config slightly, and that requires you to know where configuration is and how to read error messages.

To install something new it is easy in 70% of cases and really really hard in the remaining 30%.