I’ve started to collect good computers that are stuck on Windows 10 that are being discarded. I want to put Linux on them and give them away to less fortunate people in need of a computer. It would be easier if user names and passwords were not part of the install process but part of the first boot after installation. What distros should I look at?
Unattended-upgrades. Set it and forget it.
sure, then already open programs will start malfunctining left and right, because they assume they have x version of files and libraries on a path, but in the meantime it has been replaced with version y. firefox and thunderbird are especially sensitive to it, but are not the only one.
unattended upgrades work fine on a server with relatively simple programs, but on the desktop world things are different.
Silverblue and other distros like it fix this by not changing the running system. The pending update just becomes the running system on next boot.
Libraries loaded in RAM are not unloaded. They continue working just fine.
Firefox hasn’t broken like that for me in years, it tells me it needs to restart because it was upgraded in the background and restores the session perfectly, usually
it tells you on a new tab. if you continue without restarting it you’ll see its already falling apart