Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by hurtigioll 8 hours ago
can you lock fedora down such that a few bad clicks dont disable the desktop manager and boots it into the terminal?

this is the real problem with Linux on the desktop for non-power users

4 comments

If you talking of users who dont install their own software and just use browser only then Linux was better for them for decade.

Now you can even install something with read-only system partition with snapshots so not even a power outage can corrupt anything.

For non-power users who do need to install something it was never perfect, but now these immutable distributions are here. They have their own downsides though.

Guessing this is just a hypothetical, but if you really can do that (disable the DM via the GUI by accident), I'd be curious. If you told me to do that on purpose, my first instinct would be to uninstall the package.
Which few bad clicks would put a fedora install in that state?
If you do have permissions to install packages you can end up with a system in messed up state pretty easily.

1 - Enable wrong ROMFusion because you need these damn video codecs for VLC. I have like 20 years of Linux experience and I still messe up Fedora in 2025 trying to make video work.

2 - Just forget that big update going in background and shutdown system when not appropriate. Boom. On Windows its just much harder to accidentally do it.

Only solution is really distros with immutable root and snapshots.

> Only solution is really distros with immutable root and snapshots.

Lucky for you then, as Fedora does have an immutable desktop flavour!

https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/silverblue/

I guess you could use something like Fedora Silverblue if you feel like doing some initial explaining.