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?
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 :)
Isn’t there a community for this very discussion?
It definitely comes up in self-hosting.
