I’m suprised the family didn’t have UPS & generator at their house when a member’s life depends on a running machine. It’s not like many people built batteries in their homes just to store their solar energy. I highly doubt that a BYD is cheaper than a generator.
I absolutely dislike the hate for systemd. Especially if there’s bullshit claims like
having both sets of tools installed can increase the attack surface.
in there.
larger attack surface compared to runit, openrc, or sysVinit.
Because they don’t execute million lines super thoroughly checked shell code or why exactly? Without any explanation total FUD.
Some independent binaries from the systemd project, e.g. systemd nspawn, can even used on OpenRC and the systemd project explicitly didn’t change the way to launch udev in debug mode because the Gentoo non-systemd udev pkg maintainer asked to not do so (nicely).
You should instead tell people why OpenRC/runit is (more) awesome in your opinion and maintain initscripts for them. Maybe you can volunteer at the Debian project and get them to adopt OpenRC aside systemd instead of only removing the remnants of sysVinit support. This would also be beneficial for pragmatic pro-systemd users that have to deal with docker or chroot environments.
chezmoi.io is one of the best dotfile managers available. Great template language if you need different, many ways to distribute secrets safely, merging works well even with templates, not limited to homedir.