Linux: I can’t stop you.
It could. It just doesn’t want to. Why would it? Its your computer.
If you want to delete / including the EFI partition turning your machine into a paperweight you should be allowed to do so.
I don’t want my mom to be able to turn her computer into a paperweight…
Don’t give her sudo permission then.
How she will install anything then
Just to be clear, the person answering Flatpaks isn’t being flippant. Any tools, editors or games that Mom wants, she can safely install by searching and clicking ‘intall’, all without enough permissions to harm her computer.
Linux, for less technical parents, is genuinely really nice, now.
you can add
sudopermissions for individual users for certain commands only; and i recommend you would do that; i.e. give hersudopermission for installing/uninstalling applications, but nothing else.uninstalls the kernel package
While that is possible. You do have to go out of your way to do that in ways a typical user wouldn’t.
Aside from that like others have said. Just don’t give sudo perms and have them use Flatpak.
Installing old Linux applications IS a problem. They’re available only if someone repackaged them for newer distros. If not they can’t run anymore because of dependencies mismatch.
Flatpak time
This is a good reason for static linking. All the dependencies are built into the binary, meaning it is more portable and future proof.
We don’t need flatpak for this!
Just supply the dependencies with a chroot. That’s how we did it before distro maintainers started including the 32bit libraries into the 64bit OS.
nixsolved this by modifying LD_LIBRARY_PATH to point to the desired dependency and/or modifying the binary itself.It’s gotten significantly better with containerization technologies like oci containers and flatpak. Yes it uses more storage, but the drive space pretty cheap
The teeth on that bird are disturbing
My favourite thing about updates on my work Mac is when you say ‘try in one hour’ thinking it’ll ask you then an hour later it aggressively closes your programs. I use Linux, Mac and Windows regularly and Mac has by far the worst update experience out of all of them imo.
I’ve clicked the “install updates tonight” button a bunch of times, it consistently fails to update and then I have to force it to update the next morning. Incredibly poor experience.
Major update? 1 hour. Minor update? 1 hour.
You can also remove the fr*nch language pack via
rm -fr /But in all seriosity, i tried to install Linux dual-boot with Windows on my dad’s computer last weekend, and it broke the windows install because it doesn’t support bitlocker (apparently). Maybe i could have gotten it to work, but i abandoned the project after the first failed attempt. Still a bit salty about that. Especially since it was meant to be a demonstration how “quick and easy” installing Linux nowadays supposedly is.
The best way to dual boot windows and linux is with separate drives, not partitions imo.
You’re missing the last step, throw out the windows drive.
I’ll say it once, I’ll say it forever: Windows has better backward compatibility, period. Even compared to linux. Rebuilding an old open source linux app to work on a modern distro can be done, but it’s a process that could take hours or days. And if you don’t have the source code you’re shit out of luck. Have fun getting that binary built against a 1 year old version of glibc to work. This, incidentally is what things like flatpak, docker and ubuntu’s nonsense competitor to both (of which our hatred is entirely rational no really stop laughing) are trying to solve.
Meanwhile microsoft office still handles leap years wrong because it might break backwards compatibility with old documents. Binaries built for windows xp will usually just work on windows 11. Packages built for ubuntu 22.0 often won’t run on ubuntu 23.0. You never notice this because linux are a culture of recompilers. Rebuilding every last package once a month is just how some distros roll. But that’s not backwards compatibility, that’s ongoing maintenance.
I prefer ongoing maintenance over backwards compatibility, I can easily run such old software in an emulator in recent hardware.
I heard this concept somewhere once of “Technical Debt” wherein a thing gets made and it works really well but then it gets updated or new features are added and something breaks, but rather than tear the whole thing apart to fix the issue, a patch or bandaid gets slapped on to ship the thing. Then the next update comes along and this time it takes two bandaids, one to ‘fix’ the new problem and one to keep the old bandaid on. The next update takes three bandaids, then four . . . and so on. The accumulation of all these bandaids is known as the Technical Debt, and it must always be repaid, somehow, someday.
Microsoft stubbornly refuses to repay their technical debt at all costs, Apple is terrified of letting anyone ever get even a glimpse of their mountain of technical debt, and Linux bathes in a weird soup of refusing to let technical debt even happen and dispensing bandaids so fast they make the RedCross look like a joke.
I think this is because Windows developers are bored to remove old code and as a result Windows 11 is an added layer on top of Windows 10, 8, 7 and even XP.








