I have edited the reqs, when I wrote power failures, I have realized it’s probably going to be something atomic. Unless opensuse is better with btrfs snapshots. I don’t have much experience with any of these distros.
I use Silverblue and you can boot into previous images from the Grub menu and it’s configure out of the box that way and it uses btrfs. I think Opensuse has an Atomic/Immutable distribution as well but I have no experience with that one.
Doesn’t it boot into previous image automatically if it fails to start the new one? That would be great if it’s like that.
I have only tried silverblue in a vm a few times. I had one issue though. I think it was version 35, there was something that prevented the system updating on both images, I had to run some command to fix updates. The system worked but didn’t receive updates even on the old image.
Windows does most of these things nowadays in some shape or form.
Most of these workstaions have nvidia quadro cards. Do they work well?
You don’t know the people I deal with. Sometimes even if an icon is missing it’s a problem. But yeah it’s not a major issue. Would be nice, like on phones.
As for a recommendation, it depends what they are going to use it for.
Given your requirements, I would avoid Opensuse. Their immutable desktop editions aren’t fully baked yet and the future of their non-immutable versions is unclear.
With Fedora(including Silverblue), things get complicated if you need to run any non-free software or drivers.
I don’t like Ubuntu either but for the business use-case, Ubuntu LTS seems to meet your requirements pretty well and it would likely be a good choice. Ubuntu also has centralized management tools for businesses.
Other than that, I would probably use Debian.
It is almost impossible to find a PC-based OS that is completely immune to power failures causing filesystem corruption.
However, if this is a concern for you, you should definitely avoid anything using btrfs.
Ubuntu is not great on the lower end and it’s a bloated storage and memory hog(probably because of snap). Centralized management is a plus, but these setups should be at least on par with an average Windows install reliability wise. Install and forget.
How is Linux Mint nowadays? I think they dropped the debian version?
Then you really should advocate for UPS. They are fairly cheap for anyone who wants to help keep their systems safe from physical damage and data corruption do to power failures.
The Debian version is basically identical to the Ubuntu version, but of course, the Ubuntu version is the star and the one with the most support and attention. If Ubuntu LTS isn’t what you want, not even its flavors like Xubuntu or Lubuntu, Linux Mint is the only answer. They provide Timeshift by default and in general it is just install and forget. I think they also have an automatic update feature, but don’t quote me on that. The XFCE ISO should also cover your low spec needs. Only problem is that it does require manual intervention for updating between major releases.
I think the only distros that meet this requirement that aren’t Arch or Tumbleweed are Siduction and KaOS. They’ve both been around for a while, so you can “trust” that they will continue to be supported.
To be honest, this mix of requirements are Windows requirements at the moment. No Linux distro meets all of them. So going with an LTS distro is your best bet. The user won’t have to upgrade for several years.
Indeed. The sad reality is that Linux is still, somewhat, install and maintain it, which is frankly what computer users should do. Part of why Windows Updates are automatic and forced is because Microsoft knows for a fact the average computer user doesn’t even know if there are updates for their computer OS. Seriously, schools should put more focus on teaching kids to know that their OS needs to be maintained and how to do that.
From my experience with using Silverblue I found that more applies to Arch Linux since you actually have a wiki page about system maintenance. A bit less with other point of release distributions but since upgrades are still needed to go from one major version to the next. My Silverblue experience is just if I have updates I get a popup and then I click install and the updates are installed, but I actually most of that time just use the command-line anyways because I prefer that. I can choose to boot from a previous images in the grub menu if one fails to boot. The only thing that probably still is considered system maintenance with is that with Silverblue there is no graphical tool to rebase to a new major version image, but for all other things I think the Fedora Atomic distributions are the closest that come to it.
We now have a generation of kids who have grown up as the “touchscreen generation”, - they are consumers, not creators. They’ve grown up without knowing how to use a keyboard and mouse, they don’t have any concept of folders or a folder structure. For 95% of people now, the concept of an OS is irrelevant when it comes to compute, apps are surfaced via a web browser and hosted in the cloud.
Whether you like to admit it or not, we’re probably the last generation who will genuinely care about maintaining their compute experience like people used to do with car engines in decades past. We are no longer the target audience in so many areas… it’s frightening and depressing in some ways, but this is the reality I see now. Sure there are edge-cases, and I really hope Linux makes it to be less of a niche for personal computing, my only hope is that it’ll be a point of focus for modern technologies like AI/robotics and IoT.
