Removed by mod

Removed by mod

It’s been years since I took a look at this but I vaguely remember a handy kioskrc config file under xfce4…

found it…

That sounds like the non-techies would be able to fix it themselves on Windows without you being around, which in my experince isn’t the case.

It might be different for you with a lot of tech-affine people in your family. But for those of us being forced to be the tech support anyway, it can really make a difference if you have to fix a Linux issue once in a while or have to reinstall Windows for the 5th time this year…

ARM is shit at hardware discovery in general. So no, chromebooks don’t need a special distro. They however need a kernel adapted to the specific hardware, often down to the model (that’s also the reason Android updates take so long on phones and there is very time limited support… there’s always someone needed to adapt new updates to the specific hardware for each device, so they don’t bother for anything but their latest products).

Decryption isn’t a problem if you use the systemd hooks when creating your initrams. They try to decrypt every given luks volume with the first key provided and only ask for additional keys if that fails.

I have 3 disks in a btrfs raid setup, 4 partitions (1 for the raid setup on each, plus a swap partition on the biggest disk), all encrypted with the same password.

No script needed, just add rd.luks.name=<UUID1>=cryptroot1 rd.luks.name=<UUID2>=cryptroot2 rd.luks.name=<UUID3>=cryptroot3 rd.luks.name=<UUID4>=cryptswap to your kernel parameters and unlock all 4 with one password at boot.

It has lots of small issues that add up to a frustrating experience for mainstream users.

And 90%⁽¹⁾ those are out of Linux’ actual resposibility because they are caused by third parties screwing up… sometimes even intentional (from companies producing lackluster drivers only having a fix cobbled together for Windows specifically -looking at Realtek networking for example- to ones actually going out of their way to block Linux (MS FUD included…).

⁽¹⁾ The other 10% exist on Windows or Mac also, but people just accept them because they are used to not having a chance to change it. Seriously the amount of obscure regedits or third party tools usually surpass the number of linux issues fixed by editing an easy to read txt file.

The majority of “Linux issues” is created intentionally. It’s often not enough to not support Linux officially (even if there would be no additional work involved anyway) and let players figure out problems on their own. A lot of studios, publishers and developers actually go out of their way and actively invest time to block Linux.

So nothing will obviously change. Windows could run on a fully compatible Linux kernel tomorrow and games would still check for Linux to artificially create issues.

There is a difference here.

Unlocking home later in the boot process is not a problem, so the you can indeed have a keyfile on your root and get your home unlocked and mounted after root is done.

Swap however needs to be available early, at least if you want to use it for hibernation.

This would -at least as far as I understand it- limit your swap’s functionality for hibernation etc. Because there your swap needs to be available early. You can still do it in theory, but the key file then would need to be included in you initrams, which kind of defeats the purpose.

There is however a much more easier option: either use LVM on luks (so the volume is decrypted with the password and then contains both, root and swap) or just use the same password for root and swap while switching over to the systemd hooks (as those encryption hooks try unlokcing everything with the first provided password by default, and only ask for additional password if this fails).

EDIT: Seeing that you crossposted this from an archlinux-specific community: You can find the guide here. It’s for using a fully enrcypted system with grub as bootloader, but the details (in 8.3 and 8.4) are true for all boot methods. Replace the busybox hooks with their systemd equivalents (in minitcpio.conf for archlinux but again this isn’t limited to that init system), then add “rd.luks.name=<your swap’s uuid=swap” to your kernel parameters and also replace the “cryptdevice=UUID=<your root’s uuid>:root” that should already be there for an encrypted system (that’s the syntax for the busybox hook) with “rd.luks.name=<your root’s uuid>=root”. On startup you will be asked for your password as usual, but then both root and swap will be decrypted with it (PS: the sd-encrypt hook only tries this once… so if you screw up and misstype your password on the first try, you will then have to type it again two times, once for root, once for swap…)

with Apple dominating Europe…

Your own map diagrees, with 100% of the picked examples from Europe having Samsung as market leader.

Stick to a specific distro and train your staff

Linux is Linux. Train your staff to properly use one and they can use them all. “Distro” is just a fancy word for “which package manager and update cycle to we chose and what logo do we put on our pre-installed wallpaper”.

Yes, I actually just use Wine with a default prefix and pray it works. If it doesn’t (rarely) then the game gets his own prefix to tweak the settings.

you didn’t say what file system your /boot partition was using, so I don’t want to guess

It’s actually easy to guess. There is exactly one filesystem UEFI has to support by its specification, everything else is optional… so unless you produce for Apple -because they demand apfs support for their hardware- no vendor actually cares to implement anything but FAT.

When you say system drive this will also have your efi system partition (usually FAT-formated as that’s the only standard all UEFI implementations support), maybe also a swap partition (if not using a swap file instead) etc… so it’s not just copiying the btrfs partition your system sits on.

Yes clonezilla will keep the same UUID when cloning (and I assume your fstab properly uses UUIDs to identify drivees). In fact clonezilla uses different tools depending on filesystem and data… on the lowest level (so for example on unlocked encrypted data it can’t handle otherwise) clonezilla is really just using dd to clone everything. So cloning your disk with clonezilla, then later expanding the btrfs partition to use up the free space works is an option

But on the other hand just creating a few new partitions, then copying all data might be faster. And editing /etc/fstab with the new UUIDs while keeping everything else is no rocket science either.

The best thing: Just pick a method and do it. It’s not like you can screw up it up as long if your are not stupid and accidently clone your empty new drive to your old one instead…

misinformation != desinformation

Both exist plenty…

And just lke with the war on drugs, countries will realize it’s a lost cause. And will then instead try to coopt the system to spread their own desinformation. If you can’t win, exploit it for your own gains…

Welcome to our wonderful post-factual age.

Btrfs can mostly fo everything you would normaly use LVN or raid for natively.

Btrfs raid0 lets you combine any number of differently sized drives into one (just without the speed boost of traditional raid0 because with flexible drive sizes data is not symmetrical striped). And btrfs raid1 keeps every data duplicated, again with flexible number and sizes of drive (also with metadata on every drive).

The sytemd hooks (instead of the traditional busybox ones) then manage the one other task you use LVM for: unlocking multiple partitons (for example multiple raid partitons and swap) with just one password. Because the systemd encrypt function tries unlooking all luks partitions it finds with the first password provided and only asks for passwords for each partition if that doesn’t work.

PS: btrfs subvolumes are already flexible in size and don’t need predefined sizes. So the only things that need to be created separately are non-btrfs stuff like the efi system partition or a physical swap (which you can also skip by using a swap file instead of a partition).

BTRFS raid on LUKS-encrypted devices (no LVM, all unlocked with one password via SystemD encrypt hooks).

The main trash you accumulate are config files in you home directory because they stay after the package is uninstalled. And they just sit there not hurting anybody.