The comments by Lennart Poettering, IMO, are a prime example of the schism between what is needed for reaching &quot;the year of Linux on the desktop&quot; and what some hackers think is best.<p>Nobody sells a chainsaw with safeties disabled, remarking &quot;you can always attach the chain catcher&quot; if people report a couple of accidents, but Lennart thinks requiring almost every user to change the default install (<i>(note that you can remount it readonly at boot, simply by adding an entry for it into &#x2F;etc&#x2F;fstab, that is marked &quot;ro&quot;</i>) is a better idea than mounting it read-only, and requiring those few who need to write these variables to do some extra work by remounting it read-write.