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it would be pretty useful if we could do this with the more popular distros, but I think we may be stuck with the way where you create an admin account for yourself for maintenance, and when you give the machine to them you make a new account for them too.
but I'm curious. how will you solve keeping the system up to date? Especially the web browser, but all the other things too
Unattended-upgrades. Set it and forget it.
Maybe Fedora?
Maybe Adélie but it only uses MUSL instead of glibc and is currently in beta
What you want is an OEM install. Ubuntu and mint have them. Note sure what others do.
Fedora too, if the users are tech illiterate and they come from Windows it might be worth going for the Kinoite spin. They wouldn't be able to wreck it and the UI would feel more familiar to them.
besides these--which i occasionally use the oem option with.. i just put endless on one here, it also sets up the initial user during the first boot after install.
the oem install option that is available with ubuntu and some ubuntu-based ones lets you do some initial extra package installs and stuff, though. you run a command linked on the oeminstall desktop when you're finished with your 'preinstall'.
Debian (and I suppose a lot of derivatives) can use preseeding. That gives you pretty much full control to the whole installer where you can just start the installer and it does everything for you, including users, partitioning, installed software and so on.
So like Arch Linux but for Debian
where you can just start the installer and it does everything for you, including users,
that sounds exactly what OP does not want? especially because they still habe to wait it over until the installation completes, before they can create the users and show them around the computer
Ah, you're correct. I somehow misunderstood the assignment, OEM installation is a bit different and I don't think there's a Debian version of that readily available. You could of course write scripts to manage that, but that's a quite a bit more difficult than just set up preseed for the installer. Or you could include instructions on how to set up your accounts afterwards, but that's not the same either.
It's called "OEM install".
Ubuntu based distros should have it.
Some Fedora variants do that too. Not sure which ones.
PopOS should be able to do this since System76 makes it partly to be preinstalled on computers they sell at retail. According to some anonymous poster on reddit, it will prompt for a new user creation on the next boot after deleting the user account.
What is typically done, e.g. buying a PinePhone with PostMarketOS or refurbished setup deGoogled Murena phone, is having a default user with a well known password, e.g. 123456. AFAIR when you setup Rasbian you do have an interface to have a default user with a password.
I personally made an ISO of a configured distribution, see https://fabien.benetou.fr/Cookbook/Electronics#SocialWebXRRPi0 and that worked quite well for my use case.
You can try NixOS, there you can declaratively create users even set their passwords by providing the hash of their pass in the config file. It can also set the config of all your apps and have different sets of apps installed and configured depending on certain conditions.
Sorry, Nixos is great, but you qlearly didn't read the requirements.
Yes, sorry, my bad. Plus that's not really beginner friendly distro
I'd argue that it's not even a veteran-friendly distro, given the steep learning curve. 😅
still love it, tho. ❄️❤️