The updates are automatic. They seem to have rolled their own desktop environment. Not sure which distro. The main selling point was that I don’t need to maintain it for him. I am registered as his “tech buddy” so they contact me if something needs to be done hands on. In 3 years no issues/calls so far.
The vast majority of people have no experience installing an OS and likely never will.
The typical user uses whatever is preinstalled when the get the hardware.
My father-in-law wrecked his windows pc with malware over and over so I bought him a Wow PC https://www.mywowcomputer.com/ and he loves it. I don’t think he has any idea its running linux.
you are managing 20+ remote systems by hand?
Yes it has a web ui to connect to wifi. For cable you just plug it in.
Its simple and I can easily put a laptop or phone or whatever behind the microrouter and have confidence its only using the vpn.
When I travel I take a second microrouter with me to connect to the hotel wifi. All my devices are set to use the microrouter wifi so they never touch the hotel network, only the vpn. Easy, private, and avoids any filtering the hotek is doing.
If your concern is ensuring a killswitch type vpn setup, I do that but in a different and simple way.
I have a GLinet microrouter configured to join the vpn and active killswitch mode. This is 2 clicks in the menu. I connect it to my network via its wan port.
Everything I want behind the VPN gets connected to the microrouter lan port and job done.
I understand! For most of my career its been the same for me.
The “big” switch I’m currently contemplating at the moment is moving to FreeBSD on my home file server.
I do sometimes consider switching my workstation to OpenBSD when I get nostalgic for the early struggle days of linux. Like when you had to be really careful with hardware selection and what not.
But then I remember I had a lot more free time in those days!
Linux feels so mainstream to me now. Some days I’m temped to switch to OpenBSD or something ;)
Seriously, as someone who has been using linux as their daily driver since 2000, I find it pretry amusing.
I never login with the root account. Not even on the console. You don’t want everything you do running as root unless it is required. Otherwise it is much easier for a little mistake to become a big mess.
What does this have to do with linux? You can run that stuff on FreeBSD and go take out your misplaced frustrations on their forum just as well…
I started using linux Slackware in 1996. First time I was paid to install linux on a server in 1998. It was Red Hat 5.2 way before they switch to Enterprise Linux.
Been my desktop daily driver since 1999.
Yes, I’m old.