this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2025
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No. Doing things because you're inexperienced is one thing, but reading a very strongly-worded and scary message that explicitly told him that it was about to break his system and then doing it anyway is on another level entirely.
As much as I fucking cant stand him, I have to say.. in that case, Most new users would do exactly what he did.
Computer users always get hit with big ominous warning messages that amount to nothing 99.9% of the time. IIRC the reason something happened that time wasnt because Linus ignored the warning message, but because of a known bug in that version of the distro that was known about and wasnt fixed in the installer for months, until the video came out, that caused the DE to be removed when uninstalling something else.. Which is just pants on head and should have been fixed long before the video came out.
Besides, and I say this as a non-technical non-sysadmin linux user.. the overwhelming amount of tech support for linux doesnt encourage knowing what commands do, it encourages copy and pasting.. because almost all the tech support solutions I've ever found basically amount to "if you have X problem, copy Y command into terminal to fix it" with no explanation on why it works, just that it (hopefully) does.
This is yet another instance of blaming Linux for Windows' bad behavior.
He said, on a topic, about a big ominous message on linux, that would have done nothing at all.. if it wasnt for the bug known for months in the distro, that they refused to fix until it got bad press from a popular youtube video.
But yes, its windows fault. /s
Right, that's my point: when Linux gives a big ominous message, it's because it's actually important. If the distro hadn't had that bug, it wouldn't have given the big ominous message.
Remember, the bug wasn't the warning message itself. The bug was removing the DE when installing Steam, which the message correctly warned about. The warning message was appropriate and warranted.
It is Windows, and only Windows, that mis-trains users to ignore warnings because it issues so many spurious ones for benign situations.
imo the linus disaster was an unfortunate combination of
in the end i still think it was kinda irresponsible for linus to publish that, but the whole premise of the video was them going blindly into linux (which i also disagree but whatever)
Again, when you have no idea how much the command line can do, and the instructions is literally for something as basic as installing Steam, nobody would expect to nuke their DE.
You're also expecting that people should be able to parse an long ass message full of technical terms that they are unfamiliar with the first time they see it.
You guys really overestimate how competent the average person is. Linus was playing the perfect role of a "knows just enough to be dangerous" noob.