discusion Distro best suited for offline use

[LloydLynx]

I'll have no home internet for a while, and I'm stuck with T-Mobile data on my phone so that means an invisible and probably low data cap. Got me thinking about how my technology will do without decent internet, or none at all most of the time.

 

I currently run Void Linux on my laptop and desktop. Void is decently suited, as it has the package "void-docs" for accessing the Void handbook offline. And it's famous for being the most stable rolling release. Though with my pretty full setup, it's not uncommon for updates to be hundreds of megabytes in size when ran every couple days. I could space out updates per week and save on the data cap that way, or use friends internet connections. 

 

Of course the grass appears greener on the other side. And although I like the way I have my computers setup OS wise, I sometimes feel strongly tempted to look into other options. So why not generate some discussion on it, while I fend off temtation by writing out the situation in words. 

 

The points I find valuable in a distro for offline/limited connection use are; offline accessable documentation, such as wikis, not just man pages; a network manager capable of many different types of connections, no matter how odd; strong stability and ability to go long periods between running updates without issues; conservative updates for low download sizes. 

[TheBean]

theres no specific distro or even OS thats "best" for offline use. hell you could use windows offline. it just depends what you have saved on the device. 

download the man pages, download the OS/distro docs/wiki, download all of wikipedia. 

 

from my experience, if you're using a device offline, windows is honestly good at that. if theres no updates or random crap updating every 2 seconds, windows will generally not get in your way and is actually quite stable and less ways to randomly break your OS which can cause problems if you're offline. which is why im very confused and intrigued by the question, because I dont fully understand what you're asking

 

also, if you're offline, what networking capabilities are you talking about?

 

[Thomas4]

Any OS will work off-line, unless you use Windows 365, Dropbox, or any application requiring access to any of the online services.

Updates won't matter, because they'll catch up when you do get back on-line.

[heimdali]

23 minutes ago, Thomas4 said:

Updates won't matter, because they'll catch up when you do get back on-line.

That's not necessarliy true, especially not for Gentoo.  I've never heared of Void Linux, and it won't hurt to find out in advance if updates could be a problem.  Debian, Centos 7 (don't know about 8) and Fedora can still be updated after a pretty long time.

 

@LloydLynx

Other than that, you can always use your laptop and desktop offline.  How would that be a problem?  Just don't give them internet and if you're worried about something creating internet traffic without you allowing it, you can always use a firewall to block everything you don't want to allow.

 

What country are you in?

 

[Ralphred]

2 hours ago, heimdali said:

especially not for Gentoo

This is especially not true too, I've updated Gentoo systems with over a year between syncs, and that was before you could do some "git-fu" and go all "wayback machine" on your Portage tree. Worst case scenario is you do a selective stage 3 over the top and trick portage into rebuilding everything, which is very hands off from a "time spent hand-holding updates" point of view.

[heimdali]

43 minutes ago, Ralphred said:

This is especially not true too, I've updated Gentoo systems with over a year between syncs, and that was before you could do some "git-fu" and go all "wayback machine" on your Portage tree. Worst case scenario is you do a selective stage 3 over the top and trick portage into rebuilding everything, which is very hands off from a "time spent hand-holding updates" point of view.

It's definitely true, otherwise I wouldn't have a server than can't be updated.  I was told you're basically required to update like at least two times a week, and since updating Gentoo has always been a nightmare, that wasn't feasible at all.  The server couldn't be updated and has remained as it was ever since because Gentoo broke the updatability.  It wasn't at all about going backward, it simply wasn't possible to go forward.

 

Gentoo is cool, but never even think of considering running it in production.  Even then, with the updates always being a nightmare, Gentoo is something I really don't need.

 

So for any distribution you haven't verified its upgradeability, it's good advice to find out more when you plan on not upgrading for some time.

 

[Ralphred]

8 hours ago, heimdali said:

I was told you're basically required to update like at least two times a week

If you want to do it unmanaged as a cron job, maybe, but you may as well do it daily in that case.

8 hours ago, heimdali said:

updating Gentoo has always been a nightmare

This is not 2012 and we are not using paludis, aside from GLSA's and packages I want to update, I only update when portage starts bitching, because it's the path of least resistance to fix one issue at a time, this leads to me updating 4-6 times a year.

8 hours ago, heimdali said:

but never even think of considering running it in production

If your not confident in your ability to bend portage to your will, well that's one of the things crossdev and binhosts are for.

 

8 hours ago, heimdali said:

otherwise I wouldn't have a server than can't be updated

You should rephrase that to "a server I can't update", but feel free to wrap it up as a stage 4 and send it to me, then i can update it for you and send it back...

[RollyShed]

We go, every so often, to a holiday home with no internet, phone or cell phone. There is a computer there with Linux Mint and any writing, picture editing, watching recorded YouTube videos, play music, etc. I want to do I do it. It might get an update in a year or three if I take it home. Files are transferred to and from it from a laptop also running Linux Mint. That one does get updates every so often, maybe.

 

Yes, I have a Linux system that is quite happy to work any time and not get near the internet or get updates and still get used and work perfectly.