Is Enterprise Linux Free

On Sat, 05 Mar 2005 06:51:13 +0100, OK

When your distro includes a thousand or more applications, even an average of one update per application per six months means 2000 updates per year, or about 5 per day. Distros generally condense this to a couple of updates a month, or less frequently, apart from updates related to security issues.

A distro could do things the way Windows does; ship just a bare-bones OS with a small collection of apps, and only update that with the default updater tool; this would give the appearance that updates are an uncommon thing. Instead, distros include large numbers of applications, and generally include updates for any and all of them - whether you use them yourself or not.

If you collected the 1,000 most popular Windows apps, if they all had some issue reporting mechanism similar to what a distro uses, so you could see all the updates, bug fixes, etc, to the whole lot of them, if there was any expectation that they would, in fact, publish issues when they were discovered, then you'd have a basis for comparison.

As it stands, no such mechanism exists, and there's little reason to think that the app vendors do, in fact, report all issues as they're found, so it's very hard to determine how many outstanding issues there are with "Windows" - meaning the OS plus the 1,000 or so most popular apps - at any given time. Which in turn means we can't really say one way or the other whether "Windows" should be updating more, less, or as frequently as a typical distro; all we really know for sure is that the Windows updater and similar things offer updates less frequently.

The flip side of that is the "stability" part. It's impossible to tell, just from the frequency of updates, what impact is being had on stability or security or anything else.

up in any app that relies on OE's rendering engine. This bug may, indeed, cause IE (or the IE-inheriting apps) to crash, but doesn't render Windows itself unstable. IE crashing presumably won't affect, say, your word processor, or your DB tools, or your development tools, etc, etc, etc.