Recently in Spain we have suffered a complete power outage, with no electricity for a long time. Some were able to have power on their computers with generators, solar panels, etc. And I know you can have data connectivity with SDR or HAM radio. But my question here is, what are some good self-host/local offline software that we can have and use for when something like this happens. I know kiwix, and some other for manuals. Please feel free to share the ones you know and love, can be for any type of thing as long as it works completely offline, just name it. Of course for GNU/Linux (using Arch myself BTW). Thanks in advance.

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-3 points

AppImage suffers from the same problem that Flatpak does, the tool do work offline aren’t really good/solid and won’t save you for sure. It also requires a bunch of very small details to all align and be correct for things to work out.

Imagine the post-apocalyptic scenario, if you’re missing a dependency to get something running, or a driver, or something specific of your architecture that wasn’t deployed by the friend alongside the AppImage / Flatpak (ie. GPU driver) you’re cooked. Meanwhile on Windows it has basic GPU drivers for the entire OS bakes in, or you can probably fish around for an installer as fix the problem. It is way more likely that you’ll find machines with Windows and windows drivers / installer than Linux ones with your very specific hardware configuration.

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7 points
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AppImage suffers from the same problem that Flatpak does, the tool do work offline aren’t really good/solid and won’t save you for sure

I’ve been using my laptop in areas without internet for days. It works fine.

It also requires a bunch of very small details to all align and be correct for things to work out.

I have appimage-run from nixpkgs installed, which handles all those details. They are also not too hard to figure out manually should you need to.

Imagine the post-apocalyptic scenario, if you’re missing a dependency to get something running, or a driver, or something specific of your architecture that wasn’t deployed by the friend alongside the AppImage / Flatpak (ie. GPU driver) you’re cooked.

GPU drivers are emphatically not part of the AppImage. They are provided by Mesa, which is almost guaranteed to be installed.

Meanwhile on Windows it has basic GPU drivers for the entire OS bakes in, or you can probably fish around for an installer as fix the problem

It’s actually the other way around - if you want your GPU to work properly on a new Windows install, you have to fish around for AMD/NVidia drivers. On Linux Mesa is pretty much pre-installed on all distros.

It is way more likely that you’ll find machines with Windows and windows drivers / installer than Linux ones with your very specific hardware configuration.

LMAO, try moving a windows installation from Ryzen+AMD GPU to Intel+NVidia GPU and let me know how it goes (hint: you will have to manually uninstall, and then install a shit ton of drivers, for which you will need internet).

Meanwhile I’m typing this from a (Ryzen+AMD GPU) desktop which has an SSD from my (Intel+integrated graphics) laptop. When I plugged it in, it booted into sway just fine, with complete GPU support and all, and the only reason I had to update my config is to make it more convenient to use on the desktop.

Linux is not the best “apocalypse” OS, but it sure is better than Windows.

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5 points

Meanwhile on Windows it has basic GPU drivers for the entire OS bakes in,

Wut? Linux bundles drivers for tons of things out-of-the-box literally built as part of the kernel and many distros (e.g. Pop_OS) even provide NVidia drivers out-of-the-box as well.

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4 points

That’s why similar to windows you would need to be prepared beforehand, I have a thumbtick with my portable appimages so when I setup new computers I can open my notes etc without internet.

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4 points
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Meanwhile on Windows it has basic GPU drivers for the entire OS bakes in

this is not true, in fact, most of the machines I have here won’t work with a Windows installer .iso or Windows OS itself and some of my hw don’t even have drivers for it. So yeah no

meanwhile, most GNU/Linux .iso distro installers have drivers already on the .iso itself, including propietary ones

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1 point

(one of the older tropes in Linux-land is giving new life to old hardware just by replacing Windows with Linux)

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-4 points

Did you ever see any fresh install of Windows not be able to display at least 800x600 on any GPU? You didn’t. It works to the minimum, want more, sure grab an msi and install the drivers.

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3 points

why do that when I have the proper drivers already on my usual GNU/Linux distro of choice? and can even use as live environment, don’t even need to install (in Windows this is not easy to do)

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