It is defensible in this kind of community, but I doubt it’s defensible in a board voter base. For instance people see billionaires and are saying the government should step in and do something, because as individuals we are somewhat helpless. In this instance we’re like we can fork/we can revert so the government ideally just needs to back off. But if you ask a non-tech savvy voter (and a parent in your example) they will just see big tech and say the government should step in and do something. Has this method of governance been compromised? Sure, is this law an example of that? Sure. But what can we do? The government… Well until people can agree on that, I think we are just trying to find a compromise so that most people can easily dismiss the perspective that parenting tech is too hard. And if people can believe that typing in an age for their child and see big penalties for big tech if they ignore that age, that seems to me the placebo this situation needs.

You framed is as a non ideal philosophy. But acknowledging the things slowing down breaks and taking the time to make a calculated step so things don’t break anyway when updating can be appealing. I see it as a slightly faster stable. Inefficient maybe, but that’s just a difference in values. In practice it sounds like this hasn’t worked for some, guess I’ve been lucky. There maybe be other distros that do this better now, I couldn’t tell you, but from a, comparing philosophical differences point of view, Manjaro seems like an option.

Part of that problem is developers are drawn to Shiny too. So things people may want, start working in a random distro first. Then when you are comparing these features people want to Windows, it’s often a catch up game.

But I think the framing the whole thing even to just the comparing the lagging features of a stable and usable distro to well… Windows is still a pretty good light.

Well have to accept that “Linux can’t X” and keep all the (um actually) caveats hush until it just works. Then hopefully with enough traction and resources that time gap will shorten.

If you feel like you need to reinstall Windows anyway, Trying out Linux is a pretty low bar if you’re curious. In that situation I think everything Linus did seems plausible.