this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2025
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Ok is what is the "META" answer to grandma's laptop is going to get borked. Put this USB stick in her laptop and press next a bunch of times and she can keep using it. You have 5 lines of text to explain this solution.
I think the trick has to be that somebody who has a bit of technical skill sets the laptop up initially. I did this for my mom a while back, and once I set it up once, it just worked from there on. Non technical users tend to have a fairly small set of things they need to do like check email, browser the web, and play media. Once that's working, they never need to change anything. In fact, they don't want to change anything because they get used to the workflow, and they're comfortable.
It would be great if people set up community centres where people can bring their old laptops, and somebody switches them over to Linux for them.
Ok, what I am hearing is Nixos but with an installer like this
Rufus ISO to usb stick stick usb stick into computer press magical button to boot usb <-- this should be the most difficult part of the process Screen appears, least amount of text possible Ask only the important questions, on a single screen
then one last big scary page "this will erase everything on your computer"
Check "I understand" then press"ERASE BUTTON" (or cancel and reboots)
then it reboots and everything your average grandmother needs right there a google button an office button and that's pretty much it
Hmm, I'll pitch this idea to a couple of Nixy lfriends, maybe we can hack something together. Also throw a Linux install party!
Cool, so we need two things, The most streamlined installer possible. "Grandma's Universal Nix.Conf"
The installer should be written using 4th grade simple english, no jargon
In the top right corner there should be a language selector.
There should be only one page of questions.
The installer should work completely offline.
The installer should detect all peripherals and modify the nix file accordingly.
The second page should only be tge warning about erasing everything
The installer should detect if a nixos installation already exist. If it does, then offer the user to repair the bootloader
Optionally, the installer coukd detect a windows installation. Check the amount of free space left on the drive.
In this case instead of a wipe, offer to shrink the windows partition and install nixos in the liberated space. Install a bootloader setup for dual boot. Auto mount the ntfs partition and place a shortcut to the c:\user folder on the desktop.
I think we can be even simpler than that. Don't ask any questions. Simply generate the
hardware-configuration.nix
and have a singleconfiguration.nix
that is unchanged:configuration.nix
)npins update
andnixos-rebuild boot
, and finally annoys you until you reboot (it should also update to the next stable channel when that becomes available, and make that a big deal so that a user understands it might change some of their workflows)/home
,/nix
, and wherever flatpak are stored, is wiped on every reboot and recreated from the generation, so that "reboot it" is a viable troubleshooting strategy.