[OT] Granny-friendly Linux Distros?

[H. S. Teoh]

On Tue, May 07, 2019 at 03:17:55AM -0400, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 5/6/19 11:02 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
[...]
> > 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).
[...]

To be fair, though, when a Linux update goes bad, things can go *really*
bad.  Distant memories of nightmarish updates come to mind like libc5 ->
libc6, which if you're not careful could leave *all* your executables
unstartable (including things you take for granted like 'ls' and 'cp').
Or that horror called X11, which to this very day I keep pinned to a
specific version because new releases of the Radeon driver routinely
introduce video card lockup bugs on my hardware, which, coupled with the
recent trend of starting the GUI by default, can mean it locks up right
on bootup before you have time to react. Only my "anachronistic"
insistence on starting at the text mode console and knowing enough to
be able to roll back a bad update by hand saved me from having to
outright reinstall the entire system. A non-power user would have
neither the knowledge nor the inclination to do that, and would be faced
with what amounts to a bricked system.

Of course, IME this seems to happen a lot less often than b0rken Windows
updates, but still.  Live updating of a running system is not as simple
as it might seem, and newer doesn't always translate to better.


T

-- 
Кто везде - тот нигде.