[OT] Granny-friendly Linux Distros?

[Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa)]

On 5/7/19 4:33 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> [...]
> 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
[...]

All very good points. And actually forcing people to update, of course, 
isn't very good. But my point is that installing updates really doesn't 
*have* to get in anyone's way in the first place. Certainly not like it 
does on Windows. All you really need is something like this:

1. Check that the user hasn't disabled auto-updates.
2. *In the background*, download libfoo-2.1.archive, in a low-priority 
process
3. *In the background*, extract libfoo-2.1.archive to 
systemComponentsDirectory/libfoo-2.1, in a low-priority process
4. Do the same for the other components/packages in the update.
5. *In the background*, atomically journal a note of all the new packages.
6. Whenever you can, on startup/shutdown/whatever, spend the *fraction 
of a second* it takes to update the symlinks:
systemComponentsDirectory/libfoo-active -> 
systemComponentsDirectory/libfoo-2.1
7. Keep systemComponentsDirectory/libfoo-2.0 around for awhile in case a 
rollback is needed.

Done. Nobody had to be inconvenienced for more than about one second, 
and it was at their own leisure anyway.

But of course, Windows updates don't even remotely resemble anything 
like the above. I have no idea how they've managed to come up 
with...whatever convoluted, insane, exponential-time bizarreness that 
Windows Update does in order to make an update happen...