Yeah, this is a really nice feature; on the couple of rare occasions where an update completely borked things I was able to go from unbootable to everything back up and running in half an hour.

You know, I wasn’t that impressed by this article, but I am coming around to your point of view given that additional context.

I agree with your second point but not the first, because presumably the code processing user input has a better idea of what to do if the input is invalid because it is an empty list then some other random part of your program that requires a non-empty list but finds out that it has been given an empty list instead.

Having arrays implicitly and silently drop all values whose type does not match that of the first value seems like a major potential footgun.

I can’t speak for other distributions, but Pop!_OS has had a “Refresh Install” option for a while now that does exactly this. This hasn’t happened often, but there have been a couple of times when something borked my system to the point of making it no longer boot, and re-running the installer in “Refresh Install” mode got everything back and running within 30 minutes while preserving all of my non-system files; in particular this meant that I didn’t have to re-download my Steam and other locally installed games, which is significant because they are the largest apps on my system.

Is the main advantage of RISC-V’s that it is a free and open standard, or does it have other inherent advantages over other RISC architectures as well?

I don’t know much about Void Linux. What is it’s selling point that makes it unique?