There are 3 or 4 total sentences in the whole thing and the very first one is laying out that this whole thing is about workstations. I don’t know how much more I could do other then literally plan for this argument that you started.
The problem lies with the closing sentence: “sure, but its down there with arch as a usable OS in anything outside of an LTT video.” That implies that both Pop and Arch are not very useful for anything. That is the broad statement that people are arguing against. You may not wanted to have made a strong statement there but you did.
As far as not mentioning nontechnical users, fuck right off with that, all users are nontechnical unless otherwise stated. Anyone who has had to set a computer up for anyone other then themselves knows this. I did not make the comment assuming that someone would get bent out of shape and look for any “win”.
Nobody knows how many people work in your shop and what kind of shop it is. That’s the part where you come in with a premise that is unknown to everyone else. There’s a huge difference between a chain of three computer stores in a 10 km radius, a chain of three hobby stores scattered across a country, and a chain of 100 anything stores operating as part of a major LLC.
Nobody knows if setting up workstations involves you walking over and configuring everything by hand, you pushing preconfigured images over PXE, or (as seems to be the case) you shipping unmodified live USBs to people along with a set of instructions. I assumed the first one, for instance.
We didn’t even know what your workstations are and do. When I hear “workstation” I think of a beefy PC doing things that require a lot of processing power and are typically given to power users. But they could also be thin kiosk systems that only ever need to display a single website. Or they could manage the POS system. Or a million other things. Depending on what those workstations are, the requirements could be anything from a hyper-specialized setup to “here’s a desktop with Chrome; you know the rest”.
So while it was obvious to you that “one of my stores workstations” implies “a general-purpose computer maintained and operated by a nontechnical user in a remote location”, it wasn’t obvious to anyone else.
The stores are 250 kms apart, you can not in good faith tell me arch is appropriate unless you have an administrator on site (and if I was that administrator I would likely strike you).
Given your use case, Arch is indeed a bad fit. I wouldn’t even argue for an Arch derivative (where usually the setup is done through a bog-standard Calamares installer). But that’s like complaining that nobody ever needs a semi truck because it doesn’t meet your needs of being compact and fuel-efficient. Like Arch it’s simply a tool for a different job.
There is no situation where you are setting up workstations for users that are not Linux-averse outside of a Linux development environment, in which case those users will not like that you set up arch for them, as if they are arch fans they will also want to do their own configurations.
Those users also don’t want to deal with any other Linux distro or Windows or macOS. They want their computer to work and someone else to make that happen. And if someone else does make it happen they generally couldn’t care less about what’s under the hood as long as their workflow isn’t impeded.
(Also, there definitely are people who prefer Linux outside of Linux development. Just because my company issued me a Windows desktop doesn’t mean I have to like it.)
So your argument is that since you are opposed to the app’s very existence it’s immoral to test it for security flaws.
I’d like to argue against that with the principle of defense in depth. I’m also not a friend of OS-level age verification and would like it to be dropped. But if it is implemented I want it to be implemented in a way that isn’t wildly insecure. I can simultaneously argue against the principle as a whole and insist that any implementation of it be secure. If it does come I at least want the damage from a botched implementation to be mitigated.
To use your cage analogy, I can both complain about the principle of caging people and about the fact that the cage is badly made and poses an injury risk to the people inside it. Neither is acceptable.