Recently in Spain we have suffered a complete power outage, with no electricity for a long time. Some were able to have power on their computers with generators, solar panels, etc. And I know you can have data connectivity with SDR or HAM radio. But my question here is, what are some good self-host/local offline software that we can have and use for when something like this happens. I know kiwix, and some other for manuals. Please feel free to share the ones you know and love, can be for any type of thing as long as it works completely offline, just name it. Of course for GNU/Linux (using Arch myself BTW). Thanks in advance.
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.
(one advantage of Flatpaks over AppImage is Flatpaks bundle their libraries – most AppImages won’t run on musl libc systems)
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.
I’ve been using my laptop in areas without internet for days. It works fine.
I have
appimage-runfrom nixpkgs installed, which handles all those details. They are also not too hard to figure out manually should you need to.GPU drivers are emphatically not part of the AppImage. They are provided by Mesa, which is almost guaranteed to be installed.
It’s actually the other way around - if you want your GPU to work properly on a new Windows install, you have to fish around for AMD/NVidia drivers. On Linux Mesa is pretty much pre-installed on all distros.
LMAO, try moving a windows installation from Ryzen+AMD GPU to Intel+NVidia GPU and let me know how it goes (hint: you will have to manually uninstall, and then install a shit ton of drivers, for which you will need internet).
Meanwhile I’m typing this from a (Ryzen+AMD GPU) desktop which has an SSD from my (Intel+integrated graphics) laptop. When I plugged it in, it booted into sway just fine, with complete GPU support and all, and the only reason I had to update my config is to make it more convenient to use on the desktop.
Linux is not the best “apocalypse” OS, but it sure is better than Windows.
Wut? Linux bundles drivers for tons of things out-of-the-box literally built as part of the kernel and many distros (e.g. Pop_OS) even provide NVidia drivers out-of-the-box as well.
That’s why similar to windows you would need to be prepared beforehand, I have a thumbtick with my portable appimages so when I setup new computers I can open my notes etc without internet.
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.
Offline repository caches for Linux have been a thing for decades. People absolutely pass binaries to friends.
Flatpac may not be suitable, but that is only one way to get software on Linux.
I’m not saying it is impossible, I’m just saying you need a deal with a bunch of complexities that in the post-apocalyptic wont be pretty.
might be true, i won’t discuss that. But im willing to have alternatives, have my own mirrors etc whatever is needed
what I’m not willing to use is propietary software so more than controversial, you are just not being helpfull
I am. When “shit hits the fan” you want to be as compatible and and frictionless as possible, because at point having a running computer will be a feat on its own and you probably won’t have time/power to deal with software complexities and “ways around issues”. You most likely want to boot a machine from whatever parts are available and get some data out of it or maybe in and move on to hunting or farming. No time to be there fixing xyz package with broken dependencies and whatnot. If someone gives you a flash drive with data it follows the same logic, you want to get to something as quickly as possible.
In Linux there’s also an over-reliance on web-based solutions that can be self-hosted in your system or a 3rd one but that, once again, just adds extra friction that you don’t have with “simple” formats and binaries like pdf, docx and others that at the end of the day are just self contained apps that can be run as is without extra fuzz nor cloud dependencies.
I’m all for Linux, alternative and open-source, but in the situation described you last concern is if you’re running proprietary stuff.
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