Greetings,
I’m considering giving my brother and his family a laptop with Manjaro or elementary OS on it. The good thing about eOS you can’t mess up the Desktop as its more (alot) static than KDE.
My question is if I decide to go with Manjaro Plasma, can I lock the plasma/Desktop so they can’t mess with it?
regards,
Storm
Here’s an idea. Search through the users home directory for “plasma” and then chattr +i the files you’ll need to lock down to keep users from permanently changing it. Be aware you’ll need to use sudo to use chattr to lock and unlock files. I’m not sure if Plasma will complain (if you have kdialog installed you might get some complaints).
Use chattr +i to lock files and chattr -i to unlock them.
Set up the system, create a special account for yourself in which you configure the desktop to be as you intend it to be for your brother, but don’t configure anything in there yet in terms of personal information.
Then, create an account for your brother, and copy over everything from your account into your brother’s account, and make sure the ownership and permissions are correct. Maybe create additional accounts for your brother’s other family members, and do the same there.
If you don’t give them root access, then they won’t be able to touch your own account, and then you can use that as a template for repairing their accounts if they screw up. 