this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2025
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I don't watch his other content but in that one video he was absolutely doing exactly what a typical user would do in his situation. He was trying to follow a tutorial, he ran into the sort of warning message Windows users are conditioned to breeze past, and followed the onscreen instructions without trying to understand the confusing stuff. They changed how it worked after that incident, as they should if mass adoption is at all desirable.
The GUI wouldn't let him break it, so he tried the command line.
The command line required him to type, with punctuation "Yes, do as I say!" after a big warning.
If an average user will do that, the "fix" of needing to create a file before being able to type "Yes, do as I say!" isn't going to change anything
I think there were a few other changes indirectly inspired by what had transpired, but admittedly I can't remember most of them. I think Debian also modified apt.
I also think I remember immutable distros taking off just after this.
Pop_OS put in a patch that required you to create a file /etc/apt/break-my-system and Debian added a flag instead.
My point was if someone is going to blindly follow an instruction to type that, they're just as likely to blindly follow an instruction to
touch /etc/apt/break-my-systemor an instruction to add--allow-remove-essentialThe Gnome software GUI, what the average user would use, didn't allow it.
KDE realized Discover would have allowed it (after a warning), so that was fixed
I think the point of both is that even if he skipped all the text explaining he's about to break the system, he would have still have had to type the words explaining them, and therefore hopefully think about the words he's typing. It might not protect against copy-paste as effectively, but there's a higher chance he'd read what he'd copied than a wall of text. Not 100% effective, but it's probably going to catch more users than "do as I say", where he still thought he was installing Steam, so it's good those changes were made.
But yes, it won't catch everyone like Linus because they either won't think about it or they will copy-paste without reading. Ultimately an immutable distro might be best for him. Then again he might still find a way to break it somehow.
All I'm seeing there is he decided to deliberately did something wrong on behalf of an imaginary person and then complain that doing the deliberately wrong thing broke the computer.
tbf if your desktop environment gets uninstalled after "sudo apt install steam" it's not entirely the user's fault
wait what? which distro does that? I've installed steam probably 50+ times like that... (haven't seen the video since youtube is impossible to watch with a VPN)
PopOS had a bug in that specific version that was patched upstream
that's a pretty extreme bug. what if you already had steam installed, did the DE shit itself during the bugged update?
Its not the users fault at all.
That is insane behaviour, and part of why every desktop app should be a flatpak