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Selfhost offline software
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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This is going to be controversial but...
Linux is not really suited for the post-apocalitic no-internet world, the way the repositories are built and software is packed (almost nothing is static, a lot of dependencies on other packages everywhere) just makes it really impractical and hard to deal with those scenarios. Flatpak / containers and friends even make this situation worse because you can't easily mirror the repositories and there's no straightforward way of exporting a Flatpak as a solid file that can be shared around and installed everywhere - the current tool for that doesn't account architectures and dependencies very well.
Windows however is a much more solid and good option, yes, it's painful to hear this but in Windows you can get an exe from a friend in a flash drive and it runs as is. Same goes for installers, reinstalling the OS etc. There's only a couple of .net framework installers that will cover dependencies for 99.99% of stuff in a few MB. The same goes for macOS, however it depends on a lot of software signing nowadays and certificates that can expire and you then have a problem.
There are ways to deal with this. There's AppImage for GUI apps (that replicates the "just get an exe from a friend on a flash drive") and lots of bundling programs for non-GUI apps (I use
nix-bundlebecause I use Nix, but there are other options too).Lots of distro installers work offline too, by just bringing all the stuff you need as part of the installer.
And one major benefit of Linux is that when stuff does inevitably go wrong, it's infinitely easier to fix than proprietary garbage.
AppImage suffers from the same problem that Flatpak does, the tool do work offline aren't really good/solid and won't save you for sure. It also requires a bunch of very small details to all align and be correct for things to work out.
Imagine the post-apocalyptic scenario, if you're missing a dependency to get something running, or a driver, or something specific of your architecture that wasn't deployed by the friend alongside the AppImage / Flatpak (ie. GPU driver) you're cooked. Meanwhile on Windows it has basic GPU drivers for the entire OS bakes in, or you can probably fish around for an installer as fix the problem. It is way more likely that you'll find machines with Windows and windows drivers / installer than Linux ones with your very specific hardware configuration.
this is not true, in fact, most of the machines I have here won't work with a Windows installer .iso or Windows OS itself and some of my hw don't even have drivers for it. So yeah no
meanwhile, most GNU/Linux .iso distro installers have drivers already on the .iso itself, including propietary ones
(one of the older tropes in Linux-land is giving new life to old hardware just by replacing Windows with Linux)
Did you ever see any fresh install of Windows not be able to display at least 800x600 on any GPU? You didn't. It works to the minimum, want more, sure grab an msi and install the drivers.
why do that when I have the proper drivers already on my usual GNU/Linux distro of choice? and can even use as live environment, don't even need to install (in Windows this is not easy to do)
Not true, Rufus creates bootable and persistent USB flash drives with one checkbox. You can do it manually also.
I was trying to illustrate a point, you may have your distro, your packages and what think you need, but if we're talking about post-apocalyptic you'll probably need other stuff and at that point you have windows computers and windows software installed or installers available pretty much everywhere starting with your next door neighbor and with Linux not so much.