One of my current peeves is just how much time we spend maintaining and upgrading computer operating systems, even as ordinary users. The workload for this is unacceptably high, though it's not as though people are unaware of the problem.

Right now I'm updating one system to the beta of the new Ubuntu Feisty Fawn. (Ubuntu is the Linux distro I currently recommend.) They have done some work on building a single upgrader, which is good, but I was shocked to see an old problem resurface. In a 2 hour upgrade process, it asked me questions it didn't need to ask me, and worse, it asked them at different times in the process.

Last week I wrote about linux's problems with dependencies and upgrades and promised some suggestions this week.

There are a couple of ideas here to be stolen from (sacrilige) windows which could be a start here, though they aren't my long term solution.

Microsoft takes a different approach to updates, which consists of little patches and big service packs. The service packs integrate a lot of changes, including major changes, into one upgrade. They are not very frequent, and in some ways akin to the major distribution releases of systems like Ubuntu (but not its parent Debian ), Fedora Core and SuSE.

Installing a service pack is certainly not without risks, but the very particular combination of new libraries and changed apps in a service pack is extensively tested together, as is also the case for a major revision of a linux distribution. Generally installing one of these packs has been a safe procedure. Most windows programs also do not use hand-edited configuration files for local changes, and so don't suffer from the upgrade problems associated with this particular technique nearly as much.