I'm not sure I follow why this is a good thing. Having the option is good, but some sort of a sanity check and a warning dialog just seems like looking out for your users.
For example, I recently used Linux on the desktop as my daily driver and wrote about my experiences [1]. At one point, I considered that the system was perhaps a bit of a mess in regards to the installed packages and, not wanting to do a clean reinstall, I figured that I'd just reinstall Python in particular.
There's nothing mystifying about running an apt remove command, nor is there anything outrageous about the idea of removing some software and then later reinstalling it. However, as it turns out, this would probably break certain parts of the system, so I got a helpful warning instead:
After this operation, 1 244 MB disk space will be freed.
You are about to do something potentially harmful.
To continue type in the phrase 'Yes, do as I say!'
By that time I had already entered "y" and pressed enter, not bothering to read the message, since the rest of the prompt looked like it normally would, so instead I got this output:
Abort.
And nothing broke. I think systems should look out more for the users like that, which would give the OS less of a bad reputation.
Of course, it won't always save you, like Linus from LTT still ignored such a warning and ruined his install somewhat [2].
About Linus, I've migrated some people to Debian purely because they managed to fuck up the Ubuntu (or one of its flavours) upgrade somehow... and those were not linux-illiterate people. I dunno what it is but Ubuntu have weirdly higher rate of fuckups on upgrade than we've seen with Debian. Hell, it even survived that one time one of our admins upgraded by 2 releases of debian at once...
Might be conjecture based on small sample size I have for Debian, but what Linus was doing shouldn't really fuck anything up... Steam package in Debian "just installed"
In my experience, DEB distros have somehow been more stable than RPM ones, but Debian and Ubuntu wouldn't be an order of magnitude off from one another (aside from Ubuntu giving you more leeway in regards to proprietary software out of the box).
Well, maybe apart from the whole "snap" debacle, which is more of an architectural issue in my eyes, going around the package manager (and even then doing it in a way that's a bit more counter-culture than what AppImage or Flatpak does; even if I can understand their desire for automatic updates).
Then again, I have no issue using Docker containers and actually liked older Ubuntu LTS Unity desktop environment (which was stable in my experience, contrary to what others experienced), so maybe I'm a bit of an oddball here.
This could have been something as simple as bad install media, ignoring dpkg error messages, incompatible package versions if something was manually installed, etc.
Linux these days is quite a bit easier, but there are still edge cases that can cause problems.
I'm not sure I follow why this is a good thing. Having the option is good, but some sort of a sanity check and a warning dialog just seems like looking out for your users.
For example, I recently used Linux on the desktop as my daily driver and wrote about my experiences [1]. At one point, I considered that the system was perhaps a bit of a mess in regards to the installed packages and, not wanting to do a clean reinstall, I figured that I'd just reinstall Python in particular.
There's nothing mystifying about running an apt remove command, nor is there anything outrageous about the idea of removing some software and then later reinstalling it. However, as it turns out, this would probably break certain parts of the system, so I got a helpful warning instead:
By that time I had already entered "y" and pressed enter, not bothering to read the message, since the rest of the prompt looked like it normally would, so instead I got this output: And nothing broke. I think systems should look out more for the users like that, which would give the OS less of a bad reputation.Of course, it won't always save you, like Linus from LTT still ignored such a warning and ruined his install somewhat [2].
[1] https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/a-week-of-linux-instead-of-...
[2] https://youtu.be/0506yDSgU7M?t=634