A major obstacle facing widespread Linux adoption... And a proposal.

Question

Updates.
No, this isn't a troll. Or a joke.
Some of you might know of the Linux Haters blog. I'm not sure who the author is, but he clearly has even less of a life than us Linux enthusiasts, given the amount of time his spends bashing both Linux and its users. However, I've seen him make one valid point, and that's this: on Linux, you can't update an application without updating the whole OS. And though there are clearly exceptions, for the most part that's true; if you keep updating one app but avoid library updates, the app will eventually break.
This doesn't happen on Windows, because apps on that platform are either shipped with their shared libraries in a nice installer, or compiled statically.
To expand on what I'm saying: backwards compatibility on Windows is fantastic. Nothing ever needs to be recompiled against a new library, because all the libraries that matter are shipped with the apps that need them or compiled into the EXEs. You can install the same Firefox package on Windows 7 or Windows 2000. When an OS stops being supported, you don't have to upgrade everything for a while, especially if you know what you're doing on the security end of things. (Think of the limited account and SRP setup I mentioned in another thread.)
On Linux, not so much. You have to update all the damn time. Not only is this confusing and scary for new users, and not only does it run the risk of breaking things, it eats up time and bandwidth - both especially if the $50 a month broadband you're paying for decides not to be so broad. (glares at ISP)
Now, Arch is a pretty specialized OS; it stays on the bleeding edge, so tons of updates are okay for it. But for Ubuntu and such... Oy. And new releases every six months, with support only lasting a year and a half to three years! Windows XP will have had eleven years of support by the time it dies!
Maybe this works for servers; I don't know, I've never administered a server. For desktops, it's a pain in the ass.
Now this is not to say that Linux is bad... Actually it has some huge advantages over Windows IMO, and being free is near the bottom of the list. For those advantages, I can put up with its annoyances. But I think that, for a lot of people, the need for constant bandwidth-hogging updates and the lack of backwards compatibility would be deal killers.
So I'm going to float a modest proposal for a desktop distribution design...
The core system (X included) is put in a bunch of big archives, with an advanced install option to select which ones instead of all of them. The core system stays static. In the event that an awful security bug is discovered and fixed, new install images are released, and new archives are made downloadable (they can just be tar -xjvpf'ed into the root directory).
(The exception would be kernel archives, for which new versions would be made available every few kernel releases. These updates would be purely optional, and could coexist side by side with the old versions.)
Packages for various extra applications would also be available. Packages would be installed to /usr/local to separate them from system stuff, and only updated in the event of major bugs. If you wanted to install the latest version of something, you could get their third-party package.
Actual package management would have dependency resolution, but use a tar.gz or tar.bz2 format...
If this all sounds familiar, that's because it's basically BSD, just with some tweaks to make it work for a Linux distro. Why it's never been done before I have absolutely no idea. I mean, pkgsrc is available for Linux, yet there are only 3 distros that have ever used it, one developing slowly and two quite dead.
Maybe I'll make a project of this idea when I have the time. Though "when I have the time" will probably be when Linux and Windows are both considered horribly obsolete. Nonetheless, I figured I might as well mention this idea and the reasons for it, and see what people think.
[/nerdy monolog]
Last edited by Gullible Jones (2010-08-16 03:32:28)

Answer 1

Actually I think your proposal sounds a bit like the approach the chakra folks are using for their independent distro. I've gone back to the vanilla arch KDE, so I haven't been following the progress, but my impression was that they'd try to keep a stable core system (though it might be more like other distro's release schedule than the longer term stability you want), keep the KDE stuff updated with the new releases, and anything else was going into self-contained bundles (similar to the way programs for Mac are distributed).
That said, I've never really seen much of a problem with keeping everything updated, though I'll admit that is one of the appeals of Arch for me and may not be representative as a whole. But I'm with bangkok_manouel, that my impression is a lot of distros that this would be be an issue for deal with it by making the updates go on without needing interaction (I'd disagree with calling it transparent, I'd see it as the opposite of transparent). The problem with that is if something goes wrong it's hard to know why.
The main problem I see in your proposal is with this paragraph:
Packages for various extra applications would also be available. Packages would be installed to /usr/local to separate them from system stuff, and only updated in the event of major bugs. If you wanted to install the latest version of something, you could get their third-party package.
I think one of the advantages of the linux package distribution model is that all software is dealt with all together through the same system. I find it much simpler than having go to websites to download things if I want a new version.
Last edited by mcmillan (2010-08-16 04:38:12)