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0 pointsreadme14y ago0 comments

> 2) For the most part (there was some wackiness with architecture changes), Windows will do something much, much closer to the Right Thing on a reinstallation. Your data's where you left it. Your applications are still installed and work. It is not, on Windows, taken for granted that you must pave your machine (yes, I know you can put /home on another partition, that's only part of the problem) in order to upgrade.

You must not have installed Linux Mint or Ubuntu lately, because they both do this.

> 1) Windows releases are much slower. Most Linux distros have a new-shiny problem: I can't trivially (by which I mean, click a button and emphatically not muck with the command line or PPAs or equivalent user-hatefulness) get the newest OpenOffice or Firefox or Chrome or whatever on an older version of Mint (or Ubuntu--and dist-upgrading Ubuntu is a dicey proposition if you like having a working computer).

Not sure why this is an issue, because "shiny-new" Linux distributions come out of the box with a quality web browser and LibreOffice, and the versions are always recent enough and updateable. That's more than I can say for Windows, which comes with Internet Explorer and no office software by default, unless you count wordpad, which is clearly not what we are talking about.

I understand in an enterprise setting those arguments might not make sense, but in a home-desktop setting, they certainly do.

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eropple14y ago

> You must not have installed Linux Mint or Ubuntu lately, because they both do this.

I've installed both recently, thanks. Neither save your system state on a reinstall--or if they do, it's certainly not the default and isn't made clear when you're doing the install.

The only acceptable thing is to reinstall and properly reconfigure any user-installed packages when they do a pave-and-reinstall, and while that's nontrivial, it's the only way to deal with the "oh, lol, reinstall everything every six months" clusterfuck in which Linux is currently enmeshed.

It seems more likely that nobody will do anything about it and instead we can have even more self-absorbed gnashing about Linux being primed to take over the desktop.

Windows, on the other hand, does this by virtue of not screwing with installed software. Loose coupling, believe it or not, has its advantages.

> Not sure why this is an issue

I think you misunderstand me. In order to get the new and shiny applications, I have to dist-upgrade. Which hilariously and regularly breaks like fucking mad. This means that, no, I can't really stay on an LTS release (and most people won't want to), because to keep up to date, I have to either play Russian roulette with dist-upgrade or...pave the entire thing. Not the case for Windows, which is what I was saying.

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