Sorry dude, but cars are technology too, not just self driving cars. Every death due to cars is a technology death. You can’t escape the reality of tradeoffs.

What do you mean science backs it up? Science is finding massive social problems with technology all the time. Social media and its negative impacts on mental health (especially for teen and preteen girls), for example. Microplastics everywhere, for another. Climate change anyone?

Sure, though the UK has a much larger proportion of those old houses than the US.

Many Americans have huge garages, some with room to park 2 or even 3 vehicles with plenty of space to walk around them. But even single garages are large enough to park cars.

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!

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. A LTS distribution where “don’t break the user’s install no matter what” is the rule is absolutely the only system I’d ever trust for grandma.

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. If I’m at grandma’s house I want to spend time talking to her, not fixing her computer.

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.

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?

I think most of the replies to my remark thought I was questioning Linux for grandma overall. I wasn’t. Just Arch. I don’t think grandma needs rolling releases.

You jest but would you really install Arch on your grandmother’s PC?

And a nice bottle of Chianti!

Yes, it is a choice. However one of the biggest problems is that so many of the good choices are gone. I’m talking about the positive social institutions and community organizations people used to belong to. The third spaces.

Communities have fragmented. Neighbours hate each other. Both of my neighbours hate our family. One is a childless, alcoholic husband and wife who also hate each other (they used to be nice years ago) who also hate us and give us creepy looks all the time. The other is green lawn-obsessed neighbour who hates us for the pine trees we have growing on our property and refuse to cut down (at our own expense) to suit their tastes.

We’re a society of severely mentally ill, isolated, confused, and angry people. Our villages and communities are all gone. We’re all a bunch of islands unto ourselves.

The manosphere is one symptom of a much larger problem. Look at it in isolation and you’ll miss the big picture. Authoritarianism is on the rise globally. Loneliness is reaching epidemic proportions. Society’s traditional institutions are a distant memory. All we have remaining are loose groups of people shouting at each other as the spectre of war lurks in the background.