In short, my question is “Is there a way to prevent a non-malicious but unknowledgable and clumsy user to ruin their own home directory?”
Say my grandma opens a file browser looking for a picture, finds those dot files or those mysteriously-named directories distracting, sets her mind to deleting them. And assume she somehow finds a way to do so. While I understand that dot files or mysteriously-named directories of a non-privileged user are of no ultimate importance, it is a maintenance nightmare.
Plus, it’s not only mysterious files that are prone to be targetted. She might well delete by accident the picture she was looking for.
Two kinds of solutions that come to mind are: -Restrict file permissions in an adequate way -Implement an easily operable, fool-proof, back-in-time scheme
Is there a mainstream, well-supported distro of GNU/Linux that has figured this use-case out?
I figure it might come in handy when Window 10 is no longer supported and the reports of hacks keep coming in.
Maybe an immutable distro like NixOS?
Knowing absolutely nothing about NixOS, and never having heard of it before this moment, I’m going to guess it’s a linux distro themed after Richard Nixon.
What if Linux was racist
It don’t matter if you’re black or white…because penguins are both.
It is a special Linux version that is made for developers, and is quite complicated. It kinda unites all operating systems where anything can be built for anything and the dependencies for code libraries and stuff are independent from the base OS. So yeah, it is operation deep throat Dick’s OS /s
I never understood why that was his code name. He’s like “I’m a secret undercover agent. Call me…deep throat”.
“What? No. You can be literally ANY combination of words. You could be Red Fox, or Sleepy Walker, or AxelRod. Literally ANY combination of words, since nobody will ever know uour code name. You’re undercover.”
“Call me Deep Throat”
“C’mon man. I don’t want to tell my spy buddies that I’m going to go meet Deep Throat in an ally for a secret meeting.”
“Call…me…Deep Throat.”
“God dammit…”
For what it’s worth, Mark Felt didn’t choose the name, Woodward initially published with “My Friend”, but the editors picked it to personify the source. And yes, they actually just used the title of a popular porno video.
Immutable distros aren’t immutable in the home folder though, they would be unusable otherwise, so that doesn’t solve OPs problem of dotfiles/personal files (I know nixOS tries to get rid of dotfiles, but in my experience that almost never works, it’s only helpful for replacing config files in /etc)
home-manager for NixOS has escaped your notice. ALL of my dot files are declared in my nix-config.
Furthermore, this module would likely complete the possibility of building a grandma-proof immutable OS complete with immutable home folders: https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/Impermanence