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dfgrbac
Guest
I am not new to Linux; I have been using it since Slackware started distribution via floppy disk downloads, and I love Linux more than ever. And my career was as an analyst/programmer for engineering supercomputers. So the responses to these comments should be interesting.
By now I would expect a Linux distribution that would be extremely easy for even a non-computer person to use and upgrade to be available. Sadly, I have not found that to be the case. Although the initial installs for the various distributions go well, keeping the system up to date - not so well. I used to dig into the systems, but I don't think I should have to do that anymore, and the average user does not want to I am sure.
Rolling upgrades sounded good when I first saw them, but for me they have not worked well. At first, the system works fine and impressively. Adding new applications works fine at first also. But if the user tries to keep the system current by applying the upgrades periodically, eventually applications start to break - one by one. My mainframe experience tells me that it is the upgraded libraries that are causing problems; this has always been a big problem for our mainframes, so we always left the old libraries there for applications that continued to use them although the new libraries claimed to be compatible. There has to be an answer for this dependency problem!
So my question is, does anyone know of a rolling upgrade distribution that actually continues to function fully as upgrades are applied?
By now I would expect a Linux distribution that would be extremely easy for even a non-computer person to use and upgrade to be available. Sadly, I have not found that to be the case. Although the initial installs for the various distributions go well, keeping the system up to date - not so well. I used to dig into the systems, but I don't think I should have to do that anymore, and the average user does not want to I am sure.
Rolling upgrades sounded good when I first saw them, but for me they have not worked well. At first, the system works fine and impressively. Adding new applications works fine at first also. But if the user tries to keep the system current by applying the upgrades periodically, eventually applications start to break - one by one. My mainframe experience tells me that it is the upgraded libraries that are causing problems; this has always been a big problem for our mainframes, so we always left the old libraries there for applications that continued to use them although the new libraries claimed to be compatible. There has to be an answer for this dependency problem!
So my question is, does anyone know of a rolling upgrade distribution that actually continues to function fully as upgrades are applied?