On Tuesday, May 7, 2019 1:17:55 AM MDT Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 5/6/19 11:02 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> > It seems to be that their current approach is their response to the problem that tons of people don't bother to update Windows (or actively avoid it), and they're sick of all of the fallout that comes from that - including Windows getting a bad rep for security issues than already have been fixed.
> I'll definitely agree with this. However...
>
> > they don't seem
> > to have managed to go about things in a way that forces people to keep
> > their systems up-to-date without causing problems. And I don't know how
> > solvable that problem is.
>
> It's entirely solvable. And conceptually speaking, not too difficult, either. Things like Nix, 0install, Arch, and probably most Linux distros at this point, all prove that quite conclusively (their only flaws in this regard are merely implementation and UI flaws, nothing theoretical or otherwise fundamental).
>
> All it really boils down to is:
> 1. Download/extract data to a new location.
> 2. Update the links, preferably atomically.
> 3. Have at the new data.
> 4. Don't go out of your way to add in things that people obviously don't
> want, like resetting their preference to disable cortana, knowingly add
> new vectors of directly invading their privacy, force-installing Win10
> on Win7 users, random UI rearranging, and other such
> suit-and-arse-driven folleys that only serve to give people *more*
> reason to kill updates with napalm and hellfire.
>
> The mere fact that MS has spent so many years failing at these basics so incredibly badly (I imagine legacy has a lot to do with #1-3, though not #4) is the ONLY reason anyone even suspects that there might be something fundamentally difficult about it (which, again, there just isn't, as other systems and package managers clearly demonstrate...at least, to the minority of users familiar with non-Windows desktops/laptops).

No linux distro that I'm aware of actually forces you to ever update. They may bug you about it, but they don't force you (and in some cases, if you wait long enough, you actually _can't_ update without reinstalling the OS, which can be really annoying with machines that you don't use regularly). My point was that I'm not sure how solvable it is to force people to keep their systems up-to-date without it causing problems for users. I'm sure that MS could do better with that, and I'm sure that they could do better with updates in general, but trying to force people to update while not getting in their way is not at all straightforward, since in order to force them, you pretty much have to get in their way eventually if they keep putting it off.

MS has of course made the situation worse with how they've forced unwanted stuff on people in updates, and they've screwed up enough updates that some people actively try to avoid updating, but even if you were starting from 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 forcing people is necessarily a good approach (as a user, I sure don't like it), but I can understand why they'd want to given the problems that they've had historically because of people who don't update or try to stay on older versions of Windows. And once you try to force people, I think that you're probably stuck with a sucky user experience with regards to updates.

Overall, I get the impression that with the current CEO, MS' approach leans towards trying to treat users' machines the same way that they treat their cloud services, and IMHO, that doesn't work very well. Certainly, it goes in the opposite direction that I'd like to see things go, and it's very different from how open source OSes are handled.

- Jonathan M Davis

On 07.05.19 07:20, 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.

(It is not really the same, because the system allows you to change its behavior.)

> When I log into Ubuntu, I want to do something now, not wait for 10 minutes clicking Ok, Yes, Install, Ok, ...
> 

You can disable the popup, but the default window manager is useless bloat anyway.

If you use e.g. i3 [1], it won't bother you.

sudo apt install i3

[1] https://i3wm.org/

On Tue, May 07, 2019 at 03:17:55AM -0400, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 5/6/19 11:02 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
[...]
> > they don't seem to have managed to go about things in a way that forces people to keep their systems up-to-date without causing problems. And I don't know how solvable that problem is.
> 
> It's entirely solvable. And conceptually speaking, not too difficult, either. Things like Nix, 0install, Arch, and probably most Linux distros at this point, all prove that quite conclusively (their only flaws in this regard are merely implementation and UI flaws, nothing theoretical or otherwise fundamental).
[...]

To be fair, though, when a Linux update goes bad, things can go *really* bad.  Distant memories of nightmarish updates come to mind like libc5 -> libc6, which if you're not careful could leave *all* your executables unstartable (including things you take for granted like 'ls' and 'cp'). Or that horror called X11, which to this very day I keep pinned to a specific version because new releases of the Radeon driver routinely introduce video card lockup bugs on my hardware, which, coupled with the recent trend of starting the GUI by default, can mean it locks up right on bootup before you have time to react. Only my "anachronistic" insistence on starting at the text mode console and knowing enough to be able to roll back a bad update by hand saved me from having to outright reinstall the entire system. A non-power user would have neither the knowledge nor the inclination to do that, and would be faced with what amounts to a bricked system.

Of course, IME this seems to happen a lot less often than b0rken Windows updates, but still.  Live updating of a running system is not as simple as it might seem, and newer doesn't always translate to better.


T

-- 
Кто везде - тот нигде.

On Mon, May 06, 2019 at 08:52:38PM -0400, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 5/6/19 8:15 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
[...]
> > What's the use of all that GUI eye-candy when the *actual* user experience is this horrible??
> 
> Eye-candy on Windows? Metro? Eye-candy? Whhaaa...???
> 
> Eye-cancer perhaps...

LOL... *I* wouldn't know what qualifies as eye-candy, I'm the guy who runs Ratpoison for window manager so that X11 behaves like a glorified 80x24 dumb terminal! :-P  Nothing is more beautiful to me than a blank screen with a bash prompt at the bottom.


T

-- 
Nobody is perfect.  I am Nobody. -- pepoluan, GKC forum

On Monday, 6 May 2019 at 17:01:21 UTC, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) wrote:
> Thanks for all the responses. (Actually, it's not *my* granny, it's my mom, but she *is* a grandparent, as find I rather enjoy reminding her ;) Yea, I'm an ass...)
>
> evilrat's comments about Mint's GUI are a bit worrying.
>
> Ubuntu LTS certainly seems to be the common recommendation. But I have some (perhaps unfounded?) concerns:
>
> - The LTSes are still, what, 3 or so years IIRC? I'm figuring her next machine will probably last her about another decade, so that's well beyond that. So what's the LTS-to-LTS upgrade process like? Is it basically an OS re-install like upgrading Windows traditionally is? Or is it as simple/transparent/painless as 'Uknown' describes Ubuntu's regular day-to-day update process to be?
>
> - It's been a looong time since I last used Ubuntu, but I remember it being clearly designed to be very Mac-like (ie, OSX). She's not experienced with Mac, she's more WinXP-through-Win7. I remember alternative desktops like KDE/Xfce (along with Kubuntu/Xubuntu) being pretty much second-class citizens. Has this improved?
>
> I'm not too terribly worried about the whole Linux-on-a-laptop thing. That's what my main machine is and in my experience Linux works pretty well on laptops these days. My main concern in this area is just making sure the BIOS (or...whatever the new thing is called now...) is unlockable so Linux can even be installed in the first place.
>
> Chromebook's an interesting idea, but probably a no-go. She's gonna need more storage than that, plus something to backup her iPhone to, probably a bigger screen than those usually have, and definitely built-in CDR. She does enough audio recording (yes, actual audio recording, not music piracy) that external CDR would be too much of a hassle.
>
> Netflix is no issue, she has one of those TVs with Roku built-in, so that's how she always does Netflix. (But ugh, I *thought* a RokuTV would be a great pick for her, but honestly, I'm seriously APPALLED at just how piss-poor the menu's responsiveness is (not to mention the boot time). It's absolutely absurd. Menus on my Apple II were more responsive, no joke. *Serious* blatant incompetence involved in these modern TVs these days. If I had it to do over, I'd go with a non-smart TV (if I could find one) and then just connect a Roku device. At least then, the Roku could be replaced without replacing the TV or worse, making her deal with two separate layers of Roku.)

Ubuntu LTS is supported for 5 years, and LTS to LTS upgrade is supposed to be easy, and in most cases it is.
These days Ubuntu has switched away from Unity (that was somewhat Mac-inspired) to Gnome (that is kinda a thing in its own right).
Usually, prior to buying a laptop, I research whether the laptop I think of supports Linux well. Most of the "leading" vendors are Ok, Dell are even more so.

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.

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

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...

On Mon, May 06, 2019 at 10:20:18PM -0700, Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d 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!

They should've hired you on the Windows Update team...! ;-)


> 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, ...

That makes me glad I don't use Ubuntu. :-/  I had an Ubuntu box once, but I just edited /etc/apt/sources.list to point to the Debian repos instead, and apt dist-upgraded out of Ubuntu into Debian. :-D


T

-- 
Long, long ago, the ancient Chinese invented a device that lets them see through walls. It was called the "window".

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

On Tue, May 07, 2019 at 12:31:30PM -0400, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) via Digitalmars-d wrote:
[...]
> 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...

It's probably because they need to run a solver for an NP-complete problem in order to deal with Windows DLL hell. :-D :-D

"Houston, we have a zero-day security flaw!"

"Is the dev team on it?"

"Yeah, they will have a patch ready in an hour."

"Great, let's solve an NP-complete problem so that we can distribute this patch to users as slowly as possible."

"Sounds like a great idea!"


T

-- 
I am Ohm of Borg. Resistance is voltage over current.