[kibwen]

> The world after the collapse of the Roman Empire did not look at all like the world before the Roman Republic, and incorporated many of the institutions and infrastructure left behind by the Roman Empire.

Our modern institutions and infrastructure depend on impossibly-complex, precariously-fragile world-spanning supply chains that rely on untold quantities of highly-skilled labor whose own training and employment is dependent upon having enough pre-existing material prosperity that 90% of the population is exempt from needing to grow their own food.

Meanwhile, the supply chain for the pre-Roman and post-Roman worlds were not very different. They were producing tin in Britain in 2000 BC, and they were producing tin in Britain in 1000 AD. Crucially, the top of the production pyramid (finished goods) was still close to the bottom of it (raw materials harvestable with minimal material dependencies) without a hundred zillion intervening layers of middlemen.

[achierius]

> Meanwhile, the supply chain for the pre-Roman and post-Roman worlds were not very different.

This isn't true! We know of huge differences between who was producing what goods and where between Roman and post-Roman Britain. To give one example: ceramic production came to a complete halt, and people essentially had to make do with whatever pre-exiting ceramics they had had beforehand. Sure, an agricultural worker living on their own land off in the countryside might not have noticed a huge difference -- but someone who had been living by a legionary fortress, or one of the primary imperial administrative centers, or in one of the burgeoning villas, certainly would have had to make significant changes across the period.

[kibwen]

Yes, I'm guilty of painting with an overbroad brush here in an attempt to emphasize the difference in scale between then and now. It's not the case that the collapse of Roman authority had no effect on the people of the former territories; it certainly led to an indisputable loss of living conditions across the board, including in industrial output. But my point is that, in the event of a modern collapse, we aren't going to revert to some "checkpoint" of irreversible technological progress; we could just as likely revert to the living conditions of a denizen of the remnants of the Eastern empire as of 600 AD (and that might be an optimistic outcome!). Technological progress is not a one-way street, is my meaning, and from our lofty perch, we are entirely capable of crashing hard to Earth.

[nostrademons]

And yet a consumer durable is a consumer durable regardless of whether the manufacturer stays in business, at least before the modern practice of giving everything an Internet connection and making it phone home to keep working (which CollapseOS explicitly avoids). The Mac LC that I got in 1991 would still boot up in 2012. The CD-ROMs that I burned in the late 90s, I was able to transfer to external hard disk in 2021. My solar panels and PowerWall continue to work when the power and Internet goes down.

Post-collapse society will look very different from modern Information-age society, and will definitely have a lot more people growing their own food. Knowing how to identify plants, and the care instructions (sun/soil/water/space requirements) for each variety you're growing, and how other people have handled problems like pests and rot, can save you several years of failed harvests. Several years of failed harvests is likely the difference between surviving and not surviving.

[kibwen]

I'm not intending to denigrate CollapseOS; they appear to be deliberately taking precautions for a specific degree of technological catastrophe, and it seems worthwhile for someone to prepare for that, regardless of how likely one thinks it may be.