Decades ago, if you had a hospital that wanted to look at MRImages
a normal way to get Freesurfer onto a computer was using a disk
image of a linux with it successfully installed and some
virtualisation chicanery.
Now we are decades into the cloud hellscape.
I speculate that there are two potential avenues for deployment to
low skill users now, one heavy and one light.
The heavy way is very popular: Because it is so obscure to have a
usable and offline device, single board computers are all the
rage. For less than a hundred dollars, you can have something like
a sane physical device hopefully untouched by cloud miasma. Less
than a hundred is still a pretty big number and what are you gonna
do, carry around 10 devices? So I call it heavy.
Here is the light way I want to try- given how fast and large USB
drives are now, I think that software can be distributed as pen
drives = modern game cartridges, and the proprietary OS hung
around the low skilled user's neck can just be skipped.
Live media OSes are already popular depending on the circles you
move in, and fast/big-enough thumb drives are kind of cheap.
The forces of anti-freedom have been experimenting with devices
where non-proprietary usb image boot is mysteriously broken and
will never be fixed like some Microsoft/Googlebooks (and of course
iOSBSD). And besides, what are the boot options for this device?
Still I think it is promising because other than censoring a
device's ability to boot, the approach is hidden from cloud and
based on widespread cheap physical devices.
