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?
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!
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%.
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!