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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Is this a threat? 🤔
Hey friend,
I want to be very straight forward here in the hope that it’ll give you an additional perspective:
The scenario you’re describing I’d describe as “make the life of my surrounding as easy as possible when I bite the bullet”.
. That does not include making my system or even the home server easy to use or maintain. My interests don’t matter in that case only what those people need and would want. In my case: my non tech savvy wife would want to get rid of a big desktop PC but would most likely struggle because I enjoyed using it.
This means:
- For all data there are encrypted files with passwords and/or instructions.
- For all things no one would want there is a “this is how you get rid of it most easily” guide, including "call an electrician for the following recabling to pull out the shellies.
- for the one thing not easily ripped out there is a maintenance guide and a replacement guide (a bus system monster" temporarily" installed due to good reasons).
To be clear: no non tech savvy person I know would want to use my (and I guess your) custom systems. Not one. They’d rather have a “this is the ebay description” or a “this is how you install windows”.
Your legacy will find other ways to life on - it won’t be your tools and toys though.
You can’t build a box that will survive long without your help. You’re maintaining a living system, not a sculpture. It needs someone at the wheel making decisions. Updates will have breaking changes. Tokens and certificates will expire. Eventually hardware will fail.
The best you can do is provide an easy way to export the important data into a digestible format for your loved ones to manage with the skills they have. If that means pushing it into a managed service owned by Big Tech, so be it. You don’t want to tacitly hurt them for their lack of interest in self-hosting.
If your partner is non techy, any servers you have will not be touched again in the event something happens to you.
There was a good post on planning for your death recently, with links to a Github guide. It’s not NixOS specific, but might be helpful :)
Neat, thanks! I’ll check it out. I’m not expecting anything to happen, but it would be really sucky if I left my family in the lurch or locked out of necessary things.
Isn’t there a community for this very discussion?
It definitely comes up in self-hosting.
I haven’t seen one, but it would be very handy :)
The answer depends on technical ability of your partner. In any case, they should always be able to login and extract all the data they need, so they can then reinstall, say plain Debian.
This could also be done with help from a Linux versed relative/friend. So you should leave a bit of documentation behind.
Other than that, don’t optimise for the worse case scenario. It will leave you with suboptimal system most of the time.
Do you think NixOS is currently in a state where it could theoretically be set up to be “easy mode,” or do you think having a prerequisite knowledge of programming is necessary to maintain it?
I’m inclined towards the latter opinion, but I don’t run NixOS as a daily driver on any of my systems, so I wanted to get the opinions of people who do this on a regular basis!
I’d say if this is a concern for you (stuff continues to work if you’re hit by a bus), then you should design it with that use in mind, and document it sufficiently to enable that, and also have someone else test your documentation.
My goals are to keep the setup simple and intuitive (in addition to documenting it and showing people how it works).
Hell, do some videos if you have to!
Documentation is good. I like your ideas!
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%.