alt Hacker NewsYou have an interesting definition of "bricked"
That's defined as "the device has become a brick, cannot be recovered". It was mostly popularized by broken firmware updates which effectively destroyed the device, as it could no longer be salvaged.
You calling a borked package install in userspace almost bricked is telling about your technical capability.
And I agree that people that are basically technologically illiterate should not use Linux.
They could if someone administers it for them, but if nobody can help them - it's just not the right choice.
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The internet has redefined "bricked" as meaning something stopped working but is still fixable, because they loved the word "bricked" and didn't give a shit that it had a meaning already.
Like many other slang terms, the word "bricked" has been diluted to mean "moderately messed up." It's just how language changes over time.
> They could if someone administers it for them, but if nobody can help them - it's just not the right choice.
I wonder why? If nobody can help them, they are fucked on any OS.
I think this highly depends. I would feel comfortable with giving my older relatives a linux mint cinnamon machine.
I think you might be betraying your own technical literacy gaps with that comment. In many Linux distros, your package manager can update your kernel and boot loader, from userspace. Yes plenty of safeguards exist to try to prevent really bad things from happening. Furthermore, brick has become slang for “doesn’t work”. I dislike the linguistic shift just as much as you but we can give the benefit of the doubt that the point is that everyday Linux uses still encounter massive problems like this with higher than normal frequency.
Which is the whole point, no? There would be more Linux everywhere if it didn’t occasionally break in ways that require special expertise to fix.
these days to me a device is bricked if I need to spend +1h recovering it. Happy linux user though through and through.
Can these 'technologically illiterate' use Windows?
I've spent the last 2 weeks trying to get Windows to work (hard crash at random times) when it ran flawlessly on Ubuntu.
The issue appears to have arisen because Windows decided to update my graphics drivers, so making them (for reasons AMD perhaps need to sort out) incompatible with Adrenaline. A million reboots later, using arcane programs to clear out hidden installs, hidden config, and trying to get details from a system that will readily tell you it recovered but gets shy about what caused it to crash .. eesh.
My experience is you need far more expertise to run Windows. Maybe if MS tested they're releases so it didn't break itself all the time ...