[OT] Granny-friendly Linux Distros?

H. S. Teoh hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx
Tue May 7 17:05:23 UTC 2019


On Tue, May 07, 2019 at 12:09:31PM -0400, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 5/7/19 1:20 AM, Walter Bright wrote:
> > On 5/6/2019 5:15 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> > > Am I the only one who thinks this is completely ridiculous, and a
> > > shame to our industry, that users have to put up with this kind of
> > > nonsense?
> > 
> > Heck, it would be so much better if it installed updated on
> > shutdown, not startup!
> > 
> > The same goes for Ubuntu Linux, btw. When I log into Ubuntu, I want
> > to do something now, not wait for 10 minutes clicking Ok, Yes,
> > Install, Ok, ...
> 
> I feel exactly that way about all those auto-updating programs out
> there (seems to mostly be on/from Windows as that traditionally didn't
> have a package manager.) "This web browser has an update, do you want
> to install it?" No, I want to go to a webpage. That's why I launched
> you. Go pick up after yourself on your own time.

Yeah, the first thing I do upon installing a browser is to turn off all
those annoying auto-update nonsense, telemetry, and "suggestions" page
-- I know very well exactly which website I want to visit,
thank-you-very-much, I don't need annoying flashing suggestions telling
me what to do.

I've been looking for a keyboard-driven, no-frills but functional
browser for a while now. I used to be an Opera fan, until they made that
horrible decision to throw away the Presto engine and go chrome (ugh).
So I switched to Firefox instead.  But these days firefox is just such a
bloated piece of memory-leaking, resource-hogging junk that I threw it
out as well.

Right now I'm using luakit, a webkit-based keyboard-driven browser
driven completely by Lua scripts.  But it seems outdated, and
occasionally exhibits quirks and/or broken sites, for which I have to
fallback to Firefox just to get anything done.  For the most part it
works well, though.  But being webkit underneath, it still spawns that
resource-hogging WebProcess processes that, left unchecked, will start
nibbling away at my RAM until they grow into monstrous 2GB pigs that
slow everything down.  At least luakit is fast at starting up, so
restarting is generally a lot less painful than firefox that sometimes
randomly decides that now that the user asks for a webpage it's time to
take a vacation to clean up its stale cache entries or internal database
or whatever else it's doing for 5 entire minutes while 95% I/O-bound.
(And don't get me started on the recent expired certificate fiasco that
had 90% of plugins just up and die upon startup with no recourse
whatsoever until Mozilla finally got their act together to fix it.)


> For OS-updates though, I'm not sure update-on-exit is much of an
> improvement.

If updates are really *that* important, what they really should be doing
is to schedule it at a non-intrusive time, like 3am-5am when most users
would be sleeping, power itself on with ACPI, update, then go back to
sleep. And of course, for laptops, only while plugged in, lest the user
wake up to discover their 90% battery had "conveniently" drained to 5%
on the morning they need to make an important presentation at a venue
that doesn't have an outlet close by.


> Imagine you're doing some work on your laptop at a coffee shop or a
> client's house, you finish up and need to leave, maybe get to a
> meeting on time...figure turn it off instead of sleep mode 'cause
> maybe the battery's quite low or you're just done with it for awhile
> anyway...aaaaand...Windows decides it NOW needs to spend ten, or even
> thirty or so minutes doing its update dance before it'll let you pull
> the plug and pack up.
[...]

I have fundamental ideological problems with the concept of forced
updates.  The computer should be a tool, to be used at the *user's*
convenience, not a loud-mouthed, demanding, temperamental spoiled brat
that will NOT shut up until it gets what it wants.  That's why I can't
stand things like Adobe Reader, that regularly pops up notices at the
most inconvenient of times demanding to install this update or that
patch, or worse, advertising some Adobe product IN THE MIDDLE OF AN
IMPORTANT PRESENTATION.  The whole notifications system esp. on Windows
is utterly atrocious for this.  You're in the middle of an important
conference at a moment that really should *not* be interrupted, and
suddenly there's that annoying *ding* and an annoying popup that needs
to be dismissed.  Worst of all, if that ding came from Windows Update
that has decided that enough is enough, you're updating "your Windows"
NOW no matter what, and it will not tolerate any more procrastination.
Welp, so much for that important sales pitch, it's all down the pipes
now.

It's pure evil, I tell you.  Pure evil.


> I've gotten roped into reinstalling windows for people I knew after
> their installation got corrupted because they'd regularly face exactly
> that dilemma. And that was with Win7. Win10 is even more forceful with
> updates.
> 
> *That* is why people disable Windows Update. (Well, that and all their
> broken and/or malignant updates.) Amazing that MS have still failed to
> figure that out. Weren't they famous for dogfooding?

IMNSHO, it's a deep-rooted ideological problem. In the early days it was
all about pull media: i.e., the user initiates the action, and the user
decides when, what, and where. For decades now MS has been pushing(!)
for push media: the user is no longer the active party, the user is a
passive couch potato that needs to be entertained and told what to do.
We want to be able to push updates and ads to users, who cares whether
they want it or not. It's great for entertainment and couch potatoes,
but a joke for serious work.  Sadly, nobody has gotten the joke yet.

And nowadays everyone has followed suit and playing wannabe, and now it
takes actual effort to disable all the push stuff just to regain the
power of choice.


T

-- 
Everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything about it!  -- Mark Twain


More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list