On Thursday 04 January 2007 14:06, Les Mikesell wrote: > 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 don't quite agree. Enterprise distros are perfect for situations such as offices, where stability is all and needs are relatively basic. As you remark, application versions are likely to be too far behind to be satisfying to a home user, who will probably want multimedia, for instance, and probably 3d graphics. My thinking was that, assuming that the version installed by the release works reasonably well, it would be fairly up to date and could therefore be left alone. I'm not suggesting that it should not be possible to update such applications, of course, just that any 'automatic' updates could be limited to security fixes - 'could be', mind, not 'must be'. Anne
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