Unfortunately, you’re probably right, and for me it was more the wish that it would help than the reality. The first coffee in the morning was probably not enough to get my brain working in time to post.
Taking into account my many years of experience as a forum owner, admin, mod and also normal user, I can’t disagree with you. all the work you would invest in this would probably be (as we say in German) throwing pearls before swine.
It’s a shame that this kind of behavior is widespread and there’s hardly anything you can do about it, but other things are more important to people.
I thought I was accounting for that…
The normie you describe won’t ever even consider Linux whatsoever, and will panic the moment a terminal window appears. They will hand in their smartphone for warranty repair because they can’t log in to facebook. I don’t think we’re at a risk of dealing with many of those…
The problem I alluded to was that the GUI offered an option that would likely break stuff (imagine an unlabelled “put sugar in the engine” button in a car). If the source of the problem (GUI package managers) are no longer a thing in garuda, then this whole question is probably already addressed.
Regarding the privacy stuff (not any wiki of any kind), I recall someone actually looking at the legal part of using the internet (it was a specific site, but I don’t remember which one, probably FB), and they concluded that you would have to read, I think it was 30K, but it was definitely several thousand, privacy policies, to actually know what is happening with their data. In principle, you are technically allowed to expect that, by using the internet, they are giving their informed consent to all that, however, let me know when that principle starts surviving contact with reality. This is the reason things like GDPR are important and necessary.
I honestly just wanted to recommend a small experience tweak for an important aspect of the OS. If it is out of scope for this distro, as is the impression I’m getting here, then that’s fine.
But you are correct that piling notices on top of wikis, forums and out-of-context pop-ups won’t really help. What would help (not guarantee success, which is impossible) would be if the user gets that information when they need it.
Unfortunately, the GDPR is nothing more than a paper tiger. It was created to supposedly give users rights over their privacy. But the reality is quite different. Cookie banners with hundreds of entries that you have to click away. The big players don’t give a damn, and any fines in the millions will be paid with a wink from their petty cash or from the proceeds of unpaid taxes. The very impertinence of offering banners in this form, or even several 100-page agbs, shows how these people are courted by governments.
