Rainer Weikusat <rainerweikusat@???> wrote:

> Dave Turner <dave_t_turner@???> writes:
>> There seems to be an assumption that everybody is a 'power user' and
>> knows exactly what they are doing.
>> The reality is not like that at all.
>> Leaving nasty surprises for the unwary and inexperienced is at worst
>> malicious and at best incompetent.
>
> How does this apply to someone who executed a command "because he wanted
> to watch GNOME die" after "he unmounted all important filesystem" or -
> more accurately - wrongly believed to have done so?
>
>> I would guess that most of us here have googled for the answer to some
>> programming or scripting conundrum, and how many stackoverflow etc
>> answers did you have to go through to find an answer that was correct?
>> Far too many.
>
> How does this apply to the situation?
>
>> Now imagine the poor sod new to all this... It is most emphatically
>> not gross neglect on the part of the user.
>
> The 'poor sod' wasn't "new to all of this".

Now I understand your hostility to the idea of trying to provide some safety - you are assuming we are **ONLY** talking about the person who did this deliberately. We're talking about the general case, where the "maybe not such a command line guru" is googling for suggestions and comes across the "you can do X by X" answer somewhere.
The answer was probably written prior to this UEFI mounted filesystem stuff, the user probably doesn't understand what half the things returned by mount our, and uses a command that supposedly achieves what he needs. If you are telling me that you have never *EVER* had to search for a command to do something, and used it without understanding 101% how and why it works, and what any ramifications are, and read all the release notes for everything that can possibly be affected by it - then I suggest you memory is a bit lacking. Say you read the man pages and release notes for "rm" - will you find a warning that it can brick your UEFI hardware ? Doubt it !


Trash the OS - fair game (maybe). Brick the hardware, that's another kettle of fish.

What we are talking about is the "average user" (not that there is such a thing) finding he's bricked his hardware because of a combination of buggy crapware (UEFI) and a stupid design decision with other buggy crapware) to expose that first buggy crapware to being crapped upon.
Even if someone runs rm -rf /, while the command takes some time - the actual window for it to catch the UEFI fs during a "write enable, modify, write protect" task is still fairly small. And for that to work the admin would need to do something that's going to hose the OS, and while that's running, from another terminal/console run another command that's going to update it's config. And the timing needs to be spot on within a few seconds at most.