I wonder how hard it would be to abstract the intent from the particulars of the distro being used. And then implement adapters for Arch, Slackware, Fedora and arrive at the same final polished setup.
Our machine bootstrap script at work supports Arch, Ubuntu, Debian, Pop OS, and more thanks to Homebrew. The only thing that uses the package manager is when installing Docker.
In fact the scripts for Linux and macOS are almost identical.
It is very interesting that you describe a system which points people to web content they would like and yet you do not intend to collect data on these visitors. Or did I misunderstand? Wouldn't you need to "get to know" your visitors / customers / users before you are able to show them sites they will like?
Also- I applaud you on the way you plan on serving ads. I do know that there are mechanism by which one can serve relevant ads with high likelihood of these being useful hence clicked and yet without the need to build user profiles.
In the usual senses, approaches of getting to know users, essentially I don't want to do that: (a) Users can regard uses of such data as a threat to, compromise with, and an invasion of privacy -- an important term but ill defined and with possible negative emotional reactions. (b) E.g., what a user did for the past month going deep into the NFL does not mean that they want the NFL for this visit. Instead maybe they want the NBA, a recipe for cheese popcorn, background music for a dinner party with her boyfriend, or an art print to hang over the sofa. Uh, what key words to type in to get an art print will like -- hmm ....
Assuming that their purpose of this visit is much like that of earlier visits can irritate users. (c) Using information on users personally can require cookies, a user ID, their IP address, fingerprinting, etc., all of which can irritate users, i.e., a bad taste in their mouth, a bad user experience. Quite broadly, one way to anger people, to insult them, is to let them know you believe that you have categorized them, that they are so simple that you can pigeonhole them. So, I want no hint of any such thing.
Ah, besides, maybe they are shopping for an art print to give to their daughter for her to hang over the sofa in her new house -- so the visit isn't even about the visitor but about the visitor's daughter! Fine with me!
So, instead of using general, old information about users, the interactive iterative dialog is to get data, some new data, I can manipulate to please the user for their interest that brought them to my site THIS time. The phrasing "Users who give the same dialog on the same day get the same results" is partly to have the user execute the dialog and still be comfortable about privacy.
In simple terms, my current guess is to have a narrow audience, e.g., maybe the BMW set. Then, sure, just from that, Cadillac, Tesla, Toll Brothers, Williams Sonoma, cruise lines, etc. may discover that their ads on my site are a bargain, have a quite good click thru rate. So, that would be targeting just via broad demographics.
I've always intended to announce going live at Hacker News and still plan to. But this OP and thread raise issues so close to my project that here I took the opportunity to outline my work and to ask for reactions. These days I'm gathering initial data, but there is some time to adjust some of the work. Maybe even more important, from the reactions here I can try to refine how I present this project to the public, e.g., so that the public or at least the intended users can understand how this project can help them and for me better to understand this project as others will see it.
This project has been delayed by unpredictable external events independent of the project -- the project work has been fast, fun, and easy while handling the external events has been a pain from the head down to the feet.
HN is likely the world's best collection, concentration of people to make perceptive reactions.
I was pretty sure they said it fairly plainly on their own site but what I could immediately find was more roundabout. You can see the things donations are used for here: https://foundation.mozilla.org
