Counterpoint: Installing widely used software and following common instructions to do so should not ever put you one confirmation away from destroying your desktop environment, no matter how explicit that confirmation is.
I just accidentally deleted my crontab about an hour ago because r is right next to e.
Fortunately my computer backs itself up often so I could just grab the old crontab but it was annoying and would have been problematic if I didn’t.
I also had to recover my computer a few months back because someone whoopsied the default apt repositories for Ubuntu x64 arch and pushed the x86 software there instead.
Counterpoint: Destroying my desktop environment is exactly the thing I want to do. For real, this is one of the first things I do on the regular. One safety-net for noobs is exactly enough, any more and it will become frustrating to power users.
…and installing Steam is the route you want to use to do that?
If you want to be able to tear down your environment and rebuild it or use something else yourself that’s great. I don’t want that taken away from you.
It absolutely should not be in the chain of possible effects from trying to install a common piece of desktop software with a broad target audience.
…and installing Steam is the route you want to use to do that?
Not at all, and that’s a good point that it’d make sense for a package manager to somehow discern someone doing install steam from ones doing purge gnome-desktop. But then, if the first resolves to the latter, something has already gone catastrophically wrong, any action here would be a stop-gap, which this whole “do as I say” thing essentially was. The good thing, at least, is that it’s in our hands to come up with a better solution and propose it in a form of pull request.
