[OT] Granny-friendly Linux Distros?

H. S. Teoh hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx
Tue May 7 23:06:32 UTC 2019


On Tue, May 07, 2019 at 04:12:50PM -0600, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d wrote:
[...]
> The amount of time that Windows takes to update - both with fetching
> the updates and with installing them - is insane.
[...]
> 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.
[...]

Like I said, it's probably because every update requires solving the
NP-complete problem of resolving DLL hell.  Being Microsoft, of *course*
they would represent everything as the equivalent of an arbitrary graph,
complete with unnecessary labels (accompanied by needless icons),
frills, wizard entities and un-asked-for OS upgrades -- after all, why
settle for simple solutions to simple problems when you could throw a
SAT solver at a complex problem for no good reason? -- then delegate it
to the user's PC to run said SAT solver to sort out the resulting mess.

(Or perhaps it's because all the additional frills they threw in on top
of DLL hell have successfully turned it from an NP-complete problem into
a PSPACE-complete one, which would explain why it takes exponential time
*and* exponential space to run an update. :-P :-P  Now that I think
about it, that explains a LOT of things about Windows. Like why you have
to download hundreds of MBs just for a few security patches. :-D)

That's not to say Linux updaters don't have their own faults, of course.
But at least on Debian, (1) you're not incessantly nagged with needless
popups, (2) it doesn't strong-arm you into upgrading to an entire new OS
release just to get *one* security patch, (3) it downloads stuff in a
sane amount of time, and (4) it installs stuff in minutes rather than
hours.

(I've had the pleasure of experiencing upgrading from one major release
to another with a single command (apt-get dist-upgrade), and having it
Just Work(tm) without even needing to reboot(!).  It was so painless I
was even pinching myself afterwards in disbelief that I've upgraded to a
new release and it *didn't* feel like a monumental achievement. On my
wife's Windows laptop, the smallest of security patches requires
rebooting, and enduring the process of upgrading to a new OS release was
deserving of a medal.)


T

-- 
"I suspect the best way to deal with procrastination is to put off the procrastination itself until later. I've been meaning to try this, but haven't gotten around to it yet. " -- swr


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