[OT] Granny-friendly Linux Distros?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Tuesday, May 7, 2019 10:31:30 AM MDT Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) via 
Digitalmars-d wrote:
> 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...

The amount of time that Windows takes to update - both with fetching the
updates and with installing them - is insane. And it seems to happen far too
frequently that windows update just gets stuck and never finishes.
Regardless of the timing or whether they're forced, the actual update
process for Windows is absolutely terrible. I've seen updates take several
minutes on *nix systems, but unless you're installing a ton of packages,
it's usually pretty quick - and most distros that I've used don't even grab
anything in the background. It's _never_ quick with Windows. Even whatever
they do when you reboot during the update process takes a ridiculous amount
of time. However they've set up the whole mess, they clearly have
fundamental problems with how windows update does pretty much anything that
it does.

- Jonathan M Davis