Hopefully someone can shed some light on this idea. Or explain something that kind of fits/fills the use case and need. I am looking for a basic operating system that can be updated across multiple devices like a living OS.
For instance I have a desktop PC high end specs with the same Operating System as a laptop or tablet but it’s live sync. Meaning apps, files, changes made on one system are the same on all devices. I’ve looked at cloning drives and have done it. Far too slow and cumbersome.
This would be essentially changing devices based on hardware power requirements but having the same living operating system synced across all devices so all data and abilities remain the same anytime something is needed.
Maybe I’m being far fetched or what have you and this might possibly be in the wrong Sub. But I assumed it would fall under self hosted almost. Ive considered a NAS and I’m open to other ways to structure the concept ALL IDEAS WELCOME feel free to expand on it in any way. But dealing with different operating systems and architectures of various devices is wildly difficult sometimes for software, mobility, power requirements not watts but processing power, cross compatibility. I’ve seen apps that sync across devices but some desktop apps and mobile apps aren’t cross compatible and with self hosting so many services that function well across networks and devices after years of uptime you sort of forget the configs of everything it’s a nightmare when a single app update or container causes a domino affect. Thanks everyone hopefully this is helpful to others as well with similar needs.
Well that’s a interesting approach.
First, you would need either a shared storage, like NAS, for all your devices or for them all to have equal amount of storage for your files so you can just copy everything to everywhere locally. Personally I would go with NAS, but storage problem in general has quite a few considerations, so depending on size of your data, bandwidth, hardware and everything else something other might suit your needs better.
For the operating system, you would of course need to have the same OS installed on each device, and they all would need to run the same architecture (x86 most likely). With linux you can just copy your home directory over via shared storage and it’ll take care of most of the things, like app settings and preferences. But keeping the installed software in sync and updated is a bit more tricky. You could just enable automatic updates and potentially create a script to match installed packages between systems (Debian-based distros can use dpkg --get-selections and --set-selections, others have similar tools), so you would have pretty closely matching environments everywhere.
Or if you really want to keep everything exactly the same you could use Puppet or similar to force your machines into the same mold and manage software installations, configuration, updates and everything via that. It has a pretty steep learning curve, but it’s possible.
But if you want to match x86 workstations with handheld ARM devices it’s not going to work very well. Usage patterns are wildly different, software availability is hit or miss and the hardware in general differs enough that you can’t use the same configs for everything.
Maybe the closest thing would be to host web-based applications with everything and use only those, but that limits heavily on what you can actually do and doesn’t give you that much flexibility with hardware requirements, meaning either that your slower devices crawl to halt or that your powerful workstation is just sitting idle on whatever you do.
Maybe better approach would be to set up remote desktop environment on your desktop and just hop on to that whenever needed remotely. That way you could have the power on demand but you could still get benefits from portable devices.