steel_for_humans

I am aware of the limitations. She is a really BASIC user. Just uses the web browser (Chrome, because it’s a Chrome OS, well — I’ll switch her to Firefox and she won’t notice ;) ), she surfs the net, watches YT and VOD (I know the DRM limitations, again, not an issue with her, she’s perfectly happy with 720p in a window) and chats Facebook Messenger (sadly). I think an atomic distro can do all that out of the box and there’s nothing to install that’s not a web app or a Flatpak.

Is rpm-ostree how you get the other packages? I don’t know much about it apart from what’s on Fedora’s website, my understanding is it modifies the local system image so whatever you install from RPM becomes part of it. But, again, she won’t need it. She’s the compete opposite of a power user.

I’m thinking of replacing Chrome OS on an older Chromebook (Acer CB-314) that’s been slowing down a lot. I don’t know what Google is doing but it feels like planned obsolescence. It’s becoming unresponsive even for regular web browsing and VOD. Based on some online guides I think I need to open the device to flip a hardware switch that makes the firmware write protected, so I need to convince my significant other to let me do it, because it’s her laptop, but she keeps complaining :)

I was thinking of putting Mint on it, I want it to be super simple.

I would also consider some atomic distro so she can’t break it :) Maybe Fedora Silverblue or something like that.

I see you’re already getting downvoted and I will probably share that predicament. I get you, I feel alike. I used various distros over 20 years ago but never got really deep into Linux internals and I also forgot a lot.

I think AI can really be useful but not all models are equal (YMMV).

A couple of real world scenarios where I was having problems that were way above my head at this stage.

I encrypt my system disk with LUKS using TPM. I currently run openSUSE which has Snapper deeply integrated with the system. Because I was troubleshooting some issues and installing various packages I made some changes that I wanted to revert. Snapper is the fastest way for me, no manual reversal, no need to edit any config files, no leftovers. Just boot from a snapshot and roll back. I did that a few times. I had TPM auto-unlock set up but it stopped working. I tried re-enrolling but it still didn’t work. Of course I asked Sonnet 4.6 about that and after an AI-supported troubleshooting session the issue was resolved. It analyzed the logs, found the reason for my issue and explained what and why was causing it (in short: because I did not re-enroll the TMP key after each rollback, there were too many boot entries accumulated exceeding the systemd-pcrlock’s limit and causing all TPM predictions to fail silently).

Second thing was OpenVPN not setting up the DNS after connecting. It took me half an hour of troubleshooting with Sonnet 4.6 and it explained what was happening and proposed a few solutions. In the end it turned out that in my scenario I need Dnsmasq which is dead simple and helped me to resolve my particular issue. What’s interesting is that when I asked about the same issue on openSUSE’s sub on Reddit, a SUSE developer told me to use dnsmasq, too :)

Without AI I guess I’d just have to give up because no one was capable of helping me when I asked online (sure, maybe I didn’t ask enough or not in enough places). Without OpenVPN I cannot use this system, it’s mandatory for my job. I could switch to Fedora where OpenVPN 3 works, but I really wanted openSUSE.

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