With great power comes great responsibility, I guess. I agree it would have been nice for Linux to come with a few more sanity checks by default, like maybe a warning flag for rm -rf /* and dd commands...
I'm just more offended that the default behaviour on an extremely popular distro is failed boot = brick. You don't even get a basic command prompt to fix something, the default behavior is to lock everything down and forbid access, making it impossible to repair the machine from itself. Windows will reboot a few times and then automatically start in safe mode when this happens, you don't need to extract the drive to manually edit some text files before the system can boot again.
> I'm just more offended that the default behaviour on an extremely popular distro is failed boot = brick
If you can't properly start the OS, that's correct behavior. You don't want the OS to start writing things to /var when it can't mount the filesystem that should be mounted to /var.
In any case, the fix with an RPi is easy - pop out the microSD, mount it on the other computer and fix whatever is broken (which should be in the logs). If the RPi is the only computer, put a microSD with a plain install of the OS, mount the other microSD through an USB dongle and fix it the same way you'd do with a laptop.
FWIW, you're using the word "brick" incorrectly. Bricking is when the only fix is to throw the device away and buy a new one, which clearly is not the case here.
I don't think I am. I've been fixing hardware for years and any device that doesn't switch on is "bricked" - its utility has dropped down to zero, it has turned into a literal brick. Just because you can revive it through some arcane procedure doesn't make it any less bricked to the end user.
you're getting downvoted, but as a 19-year Linux fanboi, I actually agree with you. If the system has booted at least once, then it knows how to successfully boot. i.e. it knows of a string of modules, kernel, initrd image, etc that worked. As you upgrade, the OS should have a courtesy feature where it doesn't simply delete these files (unless you do the equivalent of issue a "-rf" force command). For instance, we currently have (kernel, initrd, filesystem, and modules that exist on our fs). All we would need to make it (nearly) brick-proof is to add one more thing: fallback-rd that has all the previous shit that worked last time. This would save so many users' asses at hardly any cost since storage is so cheap these days.
