gian

I used Arch for about 7 years. I still have it installed on an old PC but I haven’t used it recently. Every time I told pacman to update everything it felt like an adventure. Never knew if I was going to reboot to a working desktop or to a console printing cryptic error messages that take a while to Google on my phone before I get things back up and running. I wouldn’t wish that experience on my worst enemy’s grandma!

The only times I got this kind of problems where when I didn’t read some announcement or for some reason some packages (the kernel) were way too old, normally never had it on a normal update. But as I said, you have a point, even if in the end I would point out that a grandma would never be able to solve any problem caused by an update, irregardless of the distro or the OS.

It all comes down to the maintainers of Arch putting all of the responsibility for breakage (especially due to old configuration files) 100% on the user. That’s not a system any normal person should use, that’s a system for Linux hobbyists.

Only partially. Normally Arch put the new configuration file as a [something].pacnew and it is the user that should then do something, but as long as the software that use the new file could undertand that it is using an older file and it is able to handle the eventually missing new keys or removed ones there will be no problem. On my desktop I have a bunch of [some_program].conf.pacnew and everything works. Is it optimal ? Maybe not but it is not broke.

It’s fine if you want to assume all responsibility for updating grandma’s system and fixing breakage every time. I don’t have any interest in doing that.

Honestly, a grandma would just need Firefox with a couple of extension (uBlock Origin and really few others) and a network with all inbound ports blocked (so no one can connect from outside) and few outbound ports open (very few, just the common ones to use a browser). Maybe she need Openoffice, probably a DE (but a window manager could be enough) but she don’t need a lot of software we all install on out machine. It is true that Arch could be a problem when updating but I think we are talking of a very small set of packages that need to be constantly updated and in my years of Arch usage, basic packages rarely break something while updating.

The problem is that people don’t know or don’t care about a corporation selling their data.

Gemini for Home is Google’s biggest smart home play in years

For the next 3 to 4 years (if you will be lucky), then they will pass to something new and they will simply kill it, like they done with a lot of other projects.

But that means she’s not getting security updates and since she’s grandma she really needs them. On the other hand, if you’re automatically upgrading her Arch install then there will be breakage she is hopeless to fix.

True, but that would be the end result in any case where an update do something wrong or require some sort of manual intervention, it is not strictly tied to Arch. But you have a point here.

So what advantage does Arch offer grandma over a traditional release LTS distribution which will be nice and stable, not breaking or changing unexpectedly on her but still remaining current with security patches?

Only to have some newer software, but you can also update Arch every once in a while, the fact that it is a rolling release does not mean you need to update every day. The everything will depend on which distro normally uses the person who install the grandma machine

In my opinion also Arch is usable on grandma desktop.
True, it is a rolling release but I would suppose that on such machine there would not be that many packages installed and if the network is configured correclty (so nothing can connect from the outside) it would be not be a big problem, after all what grandma use is not updated on a daily basis.

Why not ? I suppose that as long as a browser (and whatever else she need) is working, my grandmother would not need much more. And I could also install a windows11 theme on KDE, if I really want to. A icon is a icon

And in the end I think that my grandmother would be able to mantain neither a window machine, so I don’t see the problem.

Carefull, this way even not looking at an ads positioned at the bottom of the page (or anyway not visible without scrolling) would mean to remove authorisation brought to you by ads.

Should we blame the old house builders for using asbestos?

Unequivocally, yes. Those shitheads knew or should have known. Don’t believe me? Here is a handy link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169500224003623

Do note the decades between when it was understood the shit was dangerous and when the decline as a building material happened.

I suppose he was referring to the ones that used it before it was understood.

And why not ? Care to explain ?

In a sane development model there is not any technical problem to do it.

get out of the internet.

At some point, this would be the best option, sadly