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What's the reason behind choosing Arch, which is definitely not a common distributions for new users? Is it that you are experienced in it and able to customize to their needs easily, as you talk about customization in your post?

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I suspect that yes it is Arch because that is what he himself uses. Note the passage about being able to push updates and new software soon after being asked. That suggests he can SSH into each install as needed to absolve them of admining the installs themselves.

Effectively their computers have become voice controlled appliances, with the voice command parser being Redirectleft...

Or just a custom pacman repository? As far as I remember, packages in official Arch repositories are constantly updated. If you update your system in the morning, then there will be new updates in the evening. So it kind of makes sense to have a custom repo.

I'm sorry for not replying earlier :) Really, in theory this is very easy. You need a command and control channel, but one that is secured and not abusable. In the first years, I used a CRON job that would pull the configuration files off a load balanced domain. Now, I've upgraded to a self made encrypted P2P version which I really do not want to talk about. However, even if I were to die in a horrible accident, all systems would remain like they are in good condition. This is, like you mentioned, due to custom repositories that repond to each client uniquely. There's no magic to be found here :)

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