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?
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.
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