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dcowyesterday at 2:22 PM2 repliesview on HN

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.


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ffsm8yesterday at 2:46 PM

> 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.

You think wrong.

I maintain multiple Linux system on the side an know about it well enough.

The Nvidia drivers however are not bios/uefi in case you didn't know. That's what firmware is.

Those can still be flashed from a root Linux booted into a graphical interface, but nonetheless were not the topic of discussion.

Aside from that - a borked kernel can still be easily recovered for most nowadays, as they usually keep the old versions around with a simple picker after an unsuccessful boot.

Still, I'm unable to grasp the point youre making in relation to what I said. I thought I was very explicitly recommending against people without any technological capability to use Linux... You seem to agree?

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