Getting people into Linux

[Les Mikesell]

Anne Wilson wrote:
> On Thursday 04 January 2007 00:08, William Case wrote:
>> By far, the greatest number of people out there just want to write
>> reports or novels, draw or create industrial designs, solve problems
>> that require higher level mathematics or do their bookkeeping, etc.,
>> etc.,  They want their computers to 'just work'.  
> 
> And there I want to chip in.  One big bugbear is when things that were working 
> get broken by updates.  I think that one small change would be immensely 
> helpful here.
> 
> Either people don't do updates at all - in which case vulnerabilities mount - 
> or they get the lot, and things occasionally get broken.  Bear in mind that 
> this class of user usually doesn't need the absolute latest and greatest - 
> just a reasonably up-to-date version of his software.  Surely it would be 
> possible to make a simple way to take security fix updates only?  That way 
> you could automate the updates for normal use, and they could get other 
> updates with the aid of someone more knowledgeable if necessary.
> 
> Maybe the possibility already exists. If it is, then it needs publicising.

That's what the 'enterprise' distributions like RHEL and Centos are
all about.  However, in my opinion the application versions get too
far behind for desktop use between releases.  I'd like to see a distro
that splits the kernel and core libraries apart from the applications
and lets them run in different cycles.  If you have a stable kernel
you can fast-track the app updates since a application bug isn't likely
to kill your ability to automatically pick up the fix as soon as it
is available, where a system bug puts you out of business completely.
You should only need a new kernel when you get new hardware that
the old one doesn't handle.  Another thing that would be nice would
be to add the ability to easily defer updates and track a list known
to be harmless.  That is, updates could be put out on a fast cycle
and some community group might track problem complaints and hold
off on adding things to the 'accept' list until there is reason to
believe that they don't break anything - or this could be done
internally in an organization in an easier manner than the current
one of having to mirror the update repository with manual management
and controlling all the user settings to force it to be used.


-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com