[OT] Granny-friendly Linux Distros?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Tuesday, May 7, 2019 1:17:55 AM MDT Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) via 
Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 5/6/19 11:02 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> > It seems to be that their current approach is their response to the
> > problem that tons of people don't bother to update Windows (or actively
> > avoid it), and they're sick of all of the fallout that comes from that
> > - including Windows getting a bad rep for security issues than already
> > have been fixed.
> I'll definitely agree with this. However...
>
> > they don't seem
> > to have managed to go about things in a way that forces people to keep
> > their systems up-to-date without causing problems. And I don't know how
> > solvable that problem is.
>
> It's entirely solvable. And conceptually speaking, not too difficult,
> either. Things like Nix, 0install, Arch, and probably most Linux distros
> at this point, all prove that quite conclusively (their only flaws in
> this regard are merely implementation and UI flaws, nothing theoretical
> or otherwise fundamental).
>
> All it really boils down to is:
> 1. Download/extract data to a new location.
> 2. Update the links, preferably atomically.
> 3. Have at the new data.
> 4. Don't go out of your way to add in things that people obviously don't
> want, like resetting their preference to disable cortana, knowingly add
> new vectors of directly invading their privacy, force-installing Win10
> on Win7 users, random UI rearranging, and other such
> suit-and-arse-driven folleys that only serve to give people *more*
> reason to kill updates with napalm and hellfire.
>
> The mere fact that MS has spent so many years failing at these basics so
> incredibly badly (I imagine legacy has a lot to do with #1-3, though not
> #4) is the ONLY reason anyone even suspects that there might be
> something fundamentally difficult about it (which, again, there just
> isn't, as other systems and package managers clearly demonstrate...at
> least, to the minority of users familiar with non-Windows
> desktops/laptops).

No linux distro that I'm aware of actually forces you to ever update. They
may bug you about it, but they don't force you (and in some cases, if you
wait long enough, you actually _can't_ update without reinstalling the OS,
which can be really annoying with machines that you don't use regularly). My
point was that I'm not sure how solvable it is to force people to keep their
systems up-to-date without it causing problems for users. I'm sure that MS
could do better with that, and I'm sure that they could do better with
updates in general, but trying to force people to update while not getting
in their way is not at all straightforward, since in order to force them,
you pretty much have to get in their way eventually if they keep putting it
off.

MS has of course made the situation worse with how they've forced unwanted
stuff on people in updates, and they've screwed up enough updates that some
people actively try to avoid updating, but even if you were starting from
scratch with no reputation involved, I don't know if you can really force
people to stay up-to-date without getting in their way. I'm not saying that
forcing people is necessarily a good approach (as a user, I sure don't like
it), but I can understand why they'd want to given the problems that they've
had historically because of people who don't update or try to stay on older
versions of Windows. And once you try to force people, I think that you're
probably stuck with a sucky user experience with regards to updates.

Overall, I get the impression that with the current CEO, MS' approach leans
towards trying to treat users' machines the same way that they treat their
cloud services, and IMHO, that doesn't work very well. Certainly, it goes in
the opposite direction that I'd like to see things go, and it's very
different from how open source OSes are handled.

- Jonathan M Davis