I’ve started to collect good computers that are stuck on Windows 10 that are being discarded. I want to put Linux on them and give them away to less fortunate people in need of a computer. It would be easier if user names and passwords were not part of the install process but part of the first boot after installation. What distros should I look at?
Linux Mint has an OEM install option that does what you want, I think.
Default Fedora workstation and Silverblue do it this way. First boot prompts you to create an account and set it up, then lands you on the desktop and asks if you want a tour of the UI
ElementaryOS does it this way
What you want is an OEM install. Ubuntu and mint have them. Note sure what others do.
Fedora too, if the users are tech illiterate and they come from Windows it might be worth going for the Kinoite spin. They wouldn’t be able to wreck it and the UI would feel more familiar to them.
besides these–which i occasionally use the oem option with… i just put endless on one here, it also sets up the initial user during the first boot after install.
the oem install option that is available with ubuntu and some ubuntu-based ones lets you do some initial extra package installs and stuff, though. you run a command linked on the oeminstall desktop when you’re finished with your ‘preinstall’.
it would be pretty useful if we could do this with the more popular distros, but I think we may be stuck with the way where you create an admin account for yourself for maintenance, and when you give the machine to them you make a new account for them too.
but I’m curious. how will you solve keeping the system up to date? Especially the web browser, but all the other things too
Unattended-upgrades. Set it and forget it.
sure, then already open programs will start malfunctining left and right, because they assume they have x version of files and libraries on a path, but in the meantime it has been replaced with version y. firefox and thunderbird are especially sensitive to it, but are not the only one.
unattended upgrades work fine on a server with relatively simple programs, but on the desktop world things are different.
Silverblue and other distros like it fix this by not changing the running system. The pending update just becomes the running system on next boot.
yeah, but they use immutable system images that you can’t change even if you wanted to. KDE’s update system is integrated with a systemd component that does the installation after a reboot, I think nowadays that’s the best of both worlds
Firefox hasn’t broken like that for me in years, it tells me it needs to restart because it was upgraded in the background and restores the session perfectly, usually
it tells you on a new tab. if you continue without restarting it you’ll see its already falling apart
Libraries loaded in RAM are not unloaded. They continue working just fine.
but does it load all libraries into ram at startup? there’s also all the resource files, including omni.ja that has a bunch of javascript code
It’s called “OEM install”.
Ubuntu based distros should have it.
Maybe Fedora?
Debian (and I suppose a lot of derivatives) can use preseeding. That gives you pretty much full control to the whole installer where you can just start the installer and it does everything for you, including users, partitioning, installed software and so on.
where you can just start the installer and it does everything for you, including users,
that sounds exactly what OP does not want? especially because they still habe to wait it over until the installation completes, before they can create the users and show them around the computer
Ah, you’re correct. I somehow misunderstood the assignment, OEM installation is a bit different and I don’t think there’s a Debian version of that readily available. You could of course write scripts to manage that, but that’s a quite a bit more difficult than just set up preseed for the installer. Or you could just include instructions on how to set up your accounts afterwards, but that’s not the same either.
So like Arch Linux but for Debian
Dude, this is like asking “Which car manufacturer ships new cars with mirros folded?” Every driver ought to know that it’s only a matter of pressing the button and they fold. Disqualifying all those good manufacturers because they don’t fold their mirrors before shipping sounds stupid.
Same here on this topic, it’s only a matter of running one command to create the user. Options include writing the instructions down on a piece of paper before giving the computer away, or close the little gap between post-installation and setting up users by yourself.
I think they want to give away computers without user accounts already created, that’s all.
PopOS should be able to do this since System76 makes it partly to be preinstalled on computers they sell at retail. According to some anonymous poster on reddit, it will prompt for a new user creation on the next boot after deleting the user account.
Some Fedora variants do that too. Not sure which ones.
GNOME for one
Maybe Adélie but it only uses MUSL instead of glibc and is currently in beta
What is typically done, e.g. buying a PinePhone with PostMarketOS or refurbished setup deGoogled Murena phone, is having a default user with a well known password, e.g. 123456. AFAIR when you setup Rasbian you do have an interface to have a default user with a password.
I personally made an ISO of a configured distribution, see https://fabien.benetou.fr/Cookbook/Electronics#SocialWebXRRPi0 and that worked quite well for my use case.
You can try NixOS, there you can declaratively create users even set their passwords by providing the hash of their pass in the config file. It can also set the config of all your apps and have different sets of apps installed and configured depending on certain conditions.
Sorry, Nixos is great, but you qlearly didn’t read the requirements.
Yes, sorry, my bad. Plus that’s not really beginner friendly distro
I’d argue that it’s not even a veteran-friendly distro, given the steep learning curve. 😅
still love it, tho. ❄️❤️
I forget which distro now, but I installed one that on first boot cones to a welcome screen for adding a user. Install just got the OS ready to deploy. It was a bigger distro, but I forget
