I totally agree. We should be more open and welcoming to new users. Imagine some new people on the steam deck being curious and diving into Linux and running into this. Undoubtedly, we'd lose at least a few users that brick their machines.
I get that this humor fits and entertains the technically inclined of us, but if we truly want more widespread use of Linux, shouldn't we open our arms to less technical users as well? Besides, even for the more technical of us, this joke is so old and run down 🙃
Eh, this is a classic joke by now. There's those jokes on the Windows side too (like the 'delete system32' one).
Except that you cannot actually delete System32 on Windows like you can delete your whole drive on Linux.
You can't do this on Linux anymore either. Unless you are on a way out of date system, you need to add the --no-preserce-root flag as well. And I think it still prompts you to make sure it is really want you want to do.
WARNING: The following essential packages will be removed. This should NOT be done unless you know exactly what you are doing!
You are about to do something potentially harmful. To continue type in the phrase 'Yes, do as I say!'
User: gleefully types in the phrase
But here it's deleting /* and not / so I think it won't prompt you for that flag, but I'm not about to try it
In NT4, you could delete ntldr. Next time you reboot, you have a dead system that was a relative PITA to recover. Generally just wipe and reload.
So many users trying to gain more disk space on those 210 MB hard drives..
God you just gave me flashbacks of trying to delete files that I was only 60% sure of what they did. Just so I could have room to install some custom rad new mouse cursor icons.
With only a little bit of malware on the side
