On Sun, 2006-02-12 at 07:57 -0500, Paul Michael Reilly wrote: > Now my > wife points out that Microsoft has a painless and practical update > facility that appears to be what I was looking for from Linux. Paul, as others have pointed out, a Microsoft "distribution" contains very little software indeed. A usable Windows installation will in most cases include software not sold by Microsoft and hence not touched or even checked for conflicts by MS Update. I'm a very infrequent Windows users, but looking at my son's PC there is stuff like video drivers, Adobe reader, Skype, AdAware, games, etc, etc. Many of them require frequent updates, sometimes critical security patches. Does MS update care about them? You're totally on your own with those. What's worse, there is no way of detecting and resolving conflicts between updates to various software packages. Does MS Update care whether an OS security patch will break your version of the NVidia driver? Or vice versa? How does this compare to Fedora? If you choose to install software that is not part of the distribution you'll find yourself in the same situation: update the extra stuff by hand, and deal with conflicts manually. However, the Fedora distribution already comes with a ton of useful software, extended to an exorbitant amount with the help of a handful of supplementary repositories. All under complete control of a single software update facility - yum - leveraging the underlying RPM mechanism to ensure integrity. Does yum have bugs, do package maintainers make mistakes? Of course, but in my opinion we have a very functional and useful software update system right now, and it is likely to get better. Windows users have nothing of the sort, and will not likely get it in the near future. Cheers Steffen.
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