Kwozyman

Banning phones is an extreme measure. No restrictions whatsoever is an extreme measure. Articles like these simply start the conversation for the society at large to find a solution and, as I was saying in my initial comment some parents are simply unaware of how addictive video games can be. For many older generation (and even some of the younger parents out there that had no contact with video games) video games are often attributed to children’s toys. The truth however is not that simple - some games are for children and some are engineered from the ground up to be as addictive as possible. Even if the final responsibility lies with the parents, we need to have those parents informed and articles like this do that.

Often times, things are not black or white but multiple shades of grey. Should we demonize video games? Absolutely not, they’re not only fun but they can be a great tool to develop social skills, critical thinking and other adult skill. Should we inherently trust all video games and all parents to “do what’s right”? No again. There is a balance in everything and dismissing unbiased articles like this one isn’t helping anyone.

So many comments on this thread are very dismissive and just wave it off as “bad parenting” or “escapism”. While both of those arguments are valid and probably a very big part of the problem, should we leave everything on the parents?

We don’t allow businesses to sell alcohol towards children because we know it’s extremely harmful and addictive. Should we simply let it free for all and then blame parents for not teaching their children that alcohol is bad and for allowing them to go out to the local shop and buy alcohol? Same goes for multiple other restrictions. Not all parents are responsible and educated enough to know how to parent. Articles like this at least show unaware parents this is a real threat and they could at least keep an eye out or educate themselves on the parental control available.

Russia Today comes to mind

Sure, but for Russia it’s the actual doctrine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_military_deception

But how will the other people know I have money if my car isn’t huge?

The protection argument has some merit, though. I remember seeing several studies that show survival rates are bigger for the SUV inhabitants in crashes. What SUV drivers don’t know (or simply don’t care about) is that it’s survival in the detriment of smaller cars inhabitants.

If you do a rollback, I assume your data remains? I assume you might need to reinstall apps which were not in the original? Or does it keep apps, data and settings across a restore?

In CoreOS (Silverblue), /etc, /var and /home (which is in fact a symlink towards /var/home) are regular writable partitions, so your data, configs and personal files are not touched by the upgrade/rollback procedure.

All the packages (and their dependencies) you’ve installed extra are also upgraded/rolledback when you do a system upgrade.

The immutable part (again, only speaking about Silverblue, I don’t know about others) refers to the inability to make changes online (i.e. without rebooting), but you can eventually change whatever file you want. The way it works is you would make your changes in a copy of the current filesystem and at boot simply mount and use the copy. If something goes wrong, you just mount the original at next boot and you have rolled back.

You make a lot of good points, but I have to disagree on the “don’t let the user see or touch anything”. That’s very much not the way immutable distros behave (and I speak mostly about Fedora Silverblue here, I don’t have experience with other immutable systems): you can touch and change anything and often times you have mechanisms put in place by the distro developers to do exactly that. It’s just that the way you make changes is very different from classical distros, that’s all, but you can definitely customize and change whatever you want. I feel the comparison between immutable distros and Apple is really far off: Apple actively prevents users from making changes, while immutable Linux is the opposite – while there may be some technical limitations, the devs try to empower the user as much as possible.

Maybe I don’t understand the question, but what prevents you from adapting your Ansible playbooks to Fedora Silverblue? I assume for Debian at some point you have a “install packages” section which you should rewrite to use rpm-ostree or flatpak instead of apt-get; your dotfiles section should remain the same etc etc.

In the FTPD logs, do you see the initrd file being pulled? Could it be a mismatch between the kernel and initrd you’re serving?