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OS Upgrades Powered By Git
JamieKitson writes "The latest Webconverger 15 release is the first Linux distribution to be automagically updatable from a Github repository. The chroot of the OS is kept natively in git's format and fuse mounted with git-fs. Webconverger fulfills the Web kiosk use case, using Firefox and competes indirectly with Google Chrome OS. Chrome OS also has an autoupdate feature, however not as powerful, unified & transparent as when simply using git."
I agree. "automagic" is is one of the things that make Microsoft products suck so badly: If you are doing only what the designers anticipated, it may work (or not). As soon as you have your own ideas, you are screwed.
That is not the Linux way. To expect understanding and willingness to learn and giving freedom and power in return is. It is no accident that a command-line gives the power of command, while a user-interface merely lets you click on the colorful buttons.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Mostly I compare Linux against other Unix systems, not Windows. To which even the most modern distributions (the plethora of distributions being a large part of the problem itself) can't even stand up against most other Unix systems from over a decade ago. *BSD, Solaris, HPUX, Irix.
a.out vs ELF
libc vs glibc
VM of the week
Filesystem of the week
Package system of the week
Source management via an email Inbox of patch files, seriously?
KDE vs GNOME
Does audio work yet?
etc, etc, etc.
The point is Linux, at its very heart, is a hacked up experimental prototype. Nothing is polished, nothing is built well, transitions and stability are never considered. Why bother? It's an erector set, it's built to be tinkered with. It's not built to be a final product, it's not built to be part of anything else's final product (see GPL). The fact that it has been as wildly successful in the market as it has is a frightening testimony.
But since you're focused on Windows: Frankly Windows 7 with Cygwin makes for a far better "Unix Workstation" in most every conceivable way then any Linux system ever made. By workstation I refer to a personal computer used for productive work. Office tasks sure, but the whole of software engineering very much included. Which is why you still find practically no Linux workstations at the desks of nearly any real professionals. Even the heavily Unix centric guys are running terminals from a Windows machine.
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