Last time I simply set up a "Linux section" and had a clear sign that said 'THIS DOES NOT RUN WINDOWS PROGRAMS" which worked...right up until the updates bit them in the ass then it was right back to me, sigh.
That's one of the problems that the "fanboi crowd" doesn't get - just because it works ok for 1/2 of 1% of all computer users doesn't mean it's worth it to anyone else (otherwise, they wouldn't ever switch back).
And with newer hardware, complete with OS, selling for so cheap, people don't "get" that it takes time to refurb a box and set it up, and that they can't expect "new" performance and features for half the price.
Maybe you should convert the non-Win boxes to "home office/small office servers" - mail and http proxy, file server, etc. Then you can charge extra - it's all in the "perceived value":-)
Nobody even mentioned fair use. There's no need - the material was not subject to copyright. But since you brought it up, if everything in the Disney movie (your example) were in the public domain or otherwise not protected by copyright, you can distribute the whole thing.
Not everything in a gpl-licensed file is protected. Strip out the protected elements, and the rest is freely distributable, without attribution.
Besides, even the kernel devs said it's okay, and they DO have standing.
There were no problems. Go ask Linus Torvalds and Co - they have standing, and they have no problem with it.
Macros and inline functions are not necessarily protected by copyright.
Example - you make a big header file with a bunch of #defines from hex color codes to X11 color names. Not protected, because it's neither creative (one of the constitutional requirements post-feist) nor is the fact that it took time a factor (sweat of the brow work is not justification for awarding copyright protection). It's also not protected because it's "scene a faire" material.
The same goes for most of the posix macros - "scene a faire" - and unprotectable.
Hmmm... Fee, fie, foe fum, I smell the stench of a freetard bum:-) (just joking... maybe...)
You really shouldn't lie in an open forum where it's easy to disprove.
But this isn't just a joke to you. This is your signature which you have now kept for months on end.
I made up that joke on October 13th (less than a month ago as of today), as anyone can verify here.
Seriously, if you're going to troll, can't you at least do better than Naughton?
You think that it isn't a problem that there are thousands of people who have the right to terminate my manufacturers license to give me updates to my phone?
No such animal exists. That's just FUD put out by the FSF
The GPLv2 clause 6 says that to get the right to once more re-distribute, they don't have to make an agreement with the complainant - just download a new copy, and conform to the license grant on the new copy. Then they can resume distribution.
When I pointed this out in response to their anti-android FUD a couple of months ago, they tried to "blah blah blah..." but when I pointed out that they were overlooking the rights of the licensee wrt contracts of adhesion, and that the clause MUST be interpreted against the licensor in all cases,... crickets...
Just because a file has a GPL license doesn't mean that the entire contents of the file are copyright, same as a copyright book may also contain, for example, a poem that is in the public domain. You're free to copy the poem.
In the case of the headers, there are large portions that are not under copyright (and this ignores the fact that many of the patches NEVER contained copyright or license notices).
No. If he has used Linux he has standing, because his rights may have been violated by Google not showing the headers.
Where is the -1 WTF mod? Google published the headers in question a while ago, and it was dealt with on slashdot back in March
"In this email from 2003, Richard Stallman says 'I've talked with our lawyer about one specific issue that you raised: that of using simple material from header files. Someone recently made the claim that including a header file always makes a derivative work. That's not the FSF's view. Our view is that just using structure definitions, typedefs, enumeration constants, macros with simple bodies, etc., is NOT enough to make a derivative work. It would take a substantial amount of code (coming from inline functions or macros with substantial bodies) to do that.'
This should help end the recent FUD about the Android 'clean headers.
There was no violation, except of common sense by people who have an anti-Android agenda.
The problem is when the government subsidizes someone who has fewer qualifications, with your tax dollars, to compete directly against you.
It's like Ford being asked to pay for GMs bail-out.
Or renters and home-owners who weren't greedy being asked to bail out under-water home-owners.
If they had been drafted into the military it would be a different situation - as it is, they got the quid pro quo of any other job - salary + on-the-job training and experience.
The IT job market is already lousy for non-qualified people, so shouldn't these subsidies be going to train them for where there's actually a sustainable demand? Or those "green" and "infrastructure" programs being hyped? Or training in home care to reduce the demands on public finances for public medical programs?
Pleaso don't continue to make us all look like freetards. This has been done over many times - not everything in the kernel is copyrightable. Linux contains a lot of stuff that you're free to copy. For example, stuff that came from BSD code, stuff that is governed by a public standard, stuff that is "scene a faire" material and therefore not subject to copyright, stuff that is "sweat of the brow" material and as such not subject to copyright.
The Android headers conform to this. So, where's the problem? Oh, right... people who think that EVERYTHING should be protected when it's their code, and NOTHING should be protected if it's someone elses code.
This fud falls into the same category that Stallman and the FSF were engaged in back in August. Lots of "blah-blah-blah" and no substance - just another attempt to get some attention with a baseless attack on Android.
Freud said it best - he wasn't worried about the nutcases he treated, but the nutcases who were friends.
Only the copyright holders have legal standing - and they've already said its all good. Naughton should know that, but that never stopped anyone who wants to do damage by creating FUD.
certainly not genius level, I've met geniuses, I can't understand half of what to them is simple
A genius enjoys making something that looks hard easy to understand - that takes insight, even a "stroke of genius". I think what you encountered wasn't genius, but BROs (Bipedal Rectal Orifices a.k.a. walking ass-holes - cf: "Don't taze me BRO!") (okay, that example was a backronym, but it works!).
Why would they? This is based on skill and experience, not the color of someone's skin. Nice try though...
No, it's not. Subsidies to employers mean that, given 2 people of "close-enough"qualifications, the one from the military, who qualifies for subsidies and tax credits, will get the job.
As for the bugs in LXDE, part of the problem is that I still have problems with my left eye, so changing the dpi from 96 to 120, and also setting much larger fonts throughout the system, is a must-have, and LXDE just doesn't honor this in all the LXDE-native apps. For someone less "visually challenged", it will still be a snappy desktop, and they shouldn't encounter these bugs.
And the LXDE file manager is FAST. So it (and the desktop itself) makes up for not honoring the changes to the cursor. Who knows, maybe it'll be fixed some time in the future;-p In the meantime, I'll put up with it because it really is fast over-all.
I finished cleaning off one drive last night, so I'm thinking that I might stick FreeBSD on it, and then in a month, after opensuse 12.1 gets some of the "growing pains" worked out, do a clean install as opposed to an in-place update, because it's still a decent distro. Perhaps some of the problems were related to the whole "Novell" thing...
I also suspect that a lot of the breakage I'm experiencing is from the in-place updates which, while a great feature, show that Linux for the desktop is about where the closed-source world was 15 years ago... and explain the (as I predicted) failure of "tumbleweed".
You said that about half of your refurbs come with XP CoA stickers... might as well use them - it's not like XP will stop working when it's EOL'd in 2-1/2 years, and this is 2-1/2 years that those boxes can continue to run while waiting for F/LOSS to improve.
For the rest, stick whatever works under either linux or freebsd, but make sure that the new owners understand this is just for surfing the web and cross-platform stuff, like flash and java games (kind of sad that it's the "slow as molasses but it works everywhere" stuff that ends up being the better solution - and on todays "recycled boxes", even many java programs perform decently with 2 gigs of ram).
For browsers, just give them firefox and opera - none of the webkit-based browsers (including chrome) properly support css3 things like -transform (not even as -webkit-transform), and chrome changes too quickly to be considered anything but unstable.
With a setup like that, they should be able to update okay, and have no problems with running stuff. Of course, they're still going to have limited functionality for things like printing (mono lasers are pretty well supported, color lasers and multi-function devices are "not there yet"), but for surfing the web, running an ftp or http server, and for learning programming, it should be decent.
If the linux or bsd system is pushed for what it's good at, rather than as a windows replacement, it CAN make sense to a certain market segment - but they have to know what they're getting into. They've got a kid who wants to learn programming (or they do)? Then a F/LOSS stack will work. They just need webmail and surfing and an office suite? Same thing (just remember to get the video codecs from the pacman repository - there's a one-click for that for opensuse).
It's when they want to do something outside those parameters (like "Hey mom, this stupid thing can't even run $SOME_GAME") that you end up with problems. So as long as they know it's a trade-off - ("You can do a, b, and c with a windows box, or a, b, and x with a linux/bsd box), they can make the right decision. And don't under-estimate Suzy Checkout Girl - she appreciates it when someone says "here are the choices - it's your decision, so ask me any questions and I'll add them to the FAQ":-)
She just might decide that opera and libreoffice fill 99% of her needs.
So, why not make a nice brochure explaining the differences, and let people make informed choices that can't come back to bite you in a year? And try a clean install of opensuse 11.4 - it's probably not THAT bad:-)
Oh - you might want to disable compositing if it gives you problems. Linux has good drivers for those old machines, but not necessarily under a compositing manager. You'll end up looking at a lot of black windows...
A few big states going bankrupt would do it. (While individual states don't have a legal right to declare bankruptcy, they can declare the entire state to be one large municipal unit or instrumentality (same as you have both a city and a metropolitan area overlap), and put the resulting entity under Chapter 9 bankruptcy.
So how about actually encouraging telecommuting? Make it mandatory for most jobs that don't absolutely require a physical presence. (Hint - if it can be outsourced, it can be telecommuted).
And cut back on the #1 consumer of fuel in the world - the US Military. Use more HUMINT and less "boots on the ground".
And tell Israel to stop the lies, make peace or go it alone. If the resulting war puts a huge dent in middle east oil supplies, that's a bonus. Not to be too cynical, but long-term, a little radiation now is probably better than a runaway greenhouse effect. And if they make peace, that's that much less oil needed to fight wars.
... but you know what's NOT important, so just filter that out. As time goes on, and you update your filters, you'll find less and less unimportant stuff gets through, same as spam filters work.
How will the dashboard know that a "write art" from a specific user in one window is significant, and that a kernel message about a raid failing is significant, but a "watch df/" changing from 63% to 62% full isn't - the point is that you don't know beforehand what happens in the windows, so you can't automate it.
Sure you can. Set it up so it parses the output and only shows you the important stuff, same as email filters. Or alternatively, have the output for each appear in its own little expandable widget in a single app.
different issues with the same distro and kde on another machine that was also running fine, but every major update kills something (wifi, sound, whatever), and recently added a random 5-second "pause" in all user input w/o anything showing in top... which means memory corruption or some really bad programming. (and the same machine runs fine under vista, which it didn't at first...).
In the last month, I've had to switch back to LXDE on this machine, because every other WM has become too bloated. Unfortunately, LXDE has its own share of silly-stupid-wt???. For example, cursor size is "forgotten" depending on which application you're in - and then changes at random - if you use the large cursors (for example, ignoring the new cursor size on the actual desktop after a reboot, which is a PITA when your desktop is 3840x1200 and you have to find the teenie-weenie cursor by wiggling all over the place). Fonts don't respect the system settings you give them (in lots of places). Various other problems, all of which just go to show that the linux desktop is a real mess. This time, it's a text editor that is soooo sssslllllloooooowwww that it's unusable, so text gets inserted in the wrong place because I type too fast...
Sure, I can drop back to vim, but I shouldn't HAVE to. If I can keep 100 source code files in my head, so should the stupid text editor... if I wanted "Notepad-level" functionality, I'd just run WFW 3.11 (boot time would be what, sub-2 seconds when I tested it off a dvd a few years ago "for the LULZ"...).
I have some backing up to finish, then it's install time. But honestly, I'd rather pay several hundred $$$ per machine to avoid these problems. And *that* is the market that open source will never be able to serve, because copyleft doesn't let people make enough money selling DEs to justify the up-front investment, and if they're "going to pay for it anyway..."
I guess what I'm trying to say is that if anyone wants to do anything more than just surf the web and open a few emails, they'd better have a quad-core with 8 gigs of ram, and still be prepared for problems. Otherwise, just use the box as a server (in which case, BSD still fills the bill anyway, so why bother going through a jillion distros... oh well..) because linux desktops REALLY suffer from bit-rot and bloat and what is "adequate" hardware today won't cut it in 3 years.
Opensuse just lost me another hour's work, so time to say "ta-ta" and welcome my BSD overlords. And if that fails, then it's time to acknowledge that open source can't produce a decent desktop.
The linux desktop just isn't ready for prime time, and after 15 years, I don't want to waste another minute with it.
How does breeding more bees solve the problem of having too many son's of bees in most cities?
More importantly (and more seriously), this is a lawsuit waiting to happen. And no landlord is going to like you cutting holes in your windowpanes (yes, I read the original press release, not just the stupid article).
Seems it would also violate rules against the number of "pets" you're allowed to have. Also, the honey produced in an urban setting would probably have too many contaminants to be healthy.
If you read the comments on the earlier article about FreeBSD on the desktop, apparently flash is okay (no reason it shouldn't be). The various desktops are also available - you have to install them, but that's not that big a deal.
Good luck, but for consumers, the best choice probably would be to pick a distro, do an install, and then just never upgrade to the next release - just security updates. Opensuse defaults to that strategy.
... or maybe you need a decent script that can go through whatever is feeding all those windows and summarize only the cogent parts that really need your attention?
You might want to hold off on the opensuse - because lately every in-place update I've done has b0rked something. It's looking more and more like linux has equaled Windows in one area - you'll need to do a clean install instead of an update to get everything working.
Supposedly, a week from tomorrow (November 18th) Opensuse 12.1 will be out, with "over 12,000 bug fixes." Which means "Don't touch it for a month because..."
Also, that's a polite way of saying "11.4 has over 12,000 bugs in it." And Opensuse is one of the better distros... (sigh)
Maybe you could try your "install 3-year-old copy, update and see what breaks" with FreeBSD. Yes, they EOL previous releases, but it's because the ports collection are more like a "rolling release." I had to do an update on a few machines running 4.7 (2003) to 6.2 (2008) a few years back, so I think that covers your "3 years" scenario quite nicely - but those were servers... YMMV.
Slashdot Mirror
That's one of the problems that the "fanboi crowd" doesn't get - just because it works ok for 1/2 of 1% of all computer users doesn't mean it's worth it to anyone else (otherwise, they wouldn't ever switch back).
And with newer hardware, complete with OS, selling for so cheap, people don't "get" that it takes time to refurb a box and set it up, and that they can't expect "new" performance and features for half the price.
Maybe you should convert the non-Win boxes to "home office/small office servers" - mail and http proxy, file server, etc. Then you can charge extra - it's all in the "perceived value" :-)
Nobody even mentioned fair use. There's no need - the material was not subject to copyright. But since you brought it up, if everything in the Disney movie (your example) were in the public domain or otherwise not protected by copyright, you can distribute the whole thing.
Not everything in a gpl-licensed file is protected. Strip out the protected elements, and the rest is freely distributable, without attribution.
Besides, even the kernel devs said it's okay, and they DO have standing.
Macros and inline functions are not necessarily protected by copyright.
Example - you make a big header file with a bunch of #defines from hex color codes to X11 color names. Not protected, because it's neither creative (one of the constitutional requirements post-feist) nor is the fact that it took time a factor (sweat of the brow work is not justification for awarding copyright protection). It's also not protected because it's "scene a faire" material.
The same goes for most of the posix macros - "scene a faire" - and unprotectable.
Hmmm ... Fee, fie, foe fum, I smell the stench of a freetard bum :-) (just joking ... maybe ...)
You really shouldn't lie in an open forum where it's easy to disprove.
I made up that joke on October 13th (less than a month ago as of today), as anyone can verify here.
Seriously, if you're going to troll, can't you at least do better than Naughton?
No such animal exists. That's just FUD put out by the FSF
The GPLv2 clause 6 says that to get the right to once more re-distribute, they don't have to make an agreement with the complainant - just download a new copy, and conform to the license grant on the new copy. Then they can resume distribution.
When I pointed this out in response to their anti-android FUD a couple of months ago, they tried to "blah blah blah ..." but when I pointed out that they were overlooking the rights of the licensee wrt contracts of adhesion, and that the clause MUST be interpreted against the licensor in all cases, ... crickets ...
Why? Because they're stuck in 1980.
There's no need for a license - everything that was published by Google is unprotected.
This was dealt with back in March
Just because a file has a GPL license doesn't mean that the entire contents of the file are copyright, same as a copyright book may also contain, for example, a poem that is in the public domain. You're free to copy the poem.
In the case of the headers, there are large portions that are not under copyright (and this ignores the fact that many of the patches NEVER contained copyright or license notices).
Where is the -1 WTF mod? Google published the headers in question a while ago, and it was dealt with on slashdot back in March
There was no violation, except of common sense by people who have an anti-Android agenda.
The problem is when the government subsidizes someone who has fewer qualifications, with your tax dollars, to compete directly against you.
It's like Ford being asked to pay for GMs bail-out.
Or renters and home-owners who weren't greedy being asked to bail out under-water home-owners.
If they had been drafted into the military it would be a different situation - as it is, they got the quid pro quo of any other job - salary + on-the-job training and experience.
The IT job market is already lousy for non-qualified people, so shouldn't these subsidies be going to train them for where there's actually a sustainable demand? Or those "green" and "infrastructure" programs being hyped? Or training in home care to reduce the demands on public finances for public medical programs?
Pleaso don't continue to make us all look like freetards. This has been done over many times - not everything in the kernel is copyrightable. Linux contains a lot of stuff that you're free to copy. For example, stuff that came from BSD code, stuff that is governed by a public standard, stuff that is "scene a faire" material and therefore not subject to copyright, stuff that is "sweat of the brow" material and as such not subject to copyright.
The Android headers conform to this. So, where's the problem? Oh, right ... people who think that EVERYTHING should be protected when it's their code, and NOTHING should be protected if it's someone elses code.
This fud falls into the same category that Stallman and the FSF were engaged in back in August. Lots of "blah-blah-blah" and no substance - just another attempt to get some attention with a baseless attack on Android.
Freud said it best - he wasn't worried about the nutcases he treated, but the nutcases who were friends.
Only the copyright holders have legal standing - and they've already said its all good. Naughton should know that, but that never stopped anyone who wants to do damage by creating FUD.
Maybe you could suggest to *your* boss that they "higher" someone who knows how to spell? (Do you also take a "coffee brake"?)
Just asking ...
A genius enjoys making something that looks hard easy to understand - that takes insight, even a "stroke of genius". I think what you encountered wasn't genius, but BROs (Bipedal Rectal Orifices a.k.a. walking ass-holes - cf: "Don't taze me BRO!") (okay, that example was a backronym, but it works!).
No, it's not. Subsidies to employers mean that, given 2 people of "close-enough"qualifications, the one from the military, who qualifies for subsidies and tax credits, will get the job.
How is that NOT economic discrimination?
As for the bugs in LXDE, part of the problem is that I still have problems with my left eye, so changing the dpi from 96 to 120, and also setting much larger fonts throughout the system, is a must-have, and LXDE just doesn't honor this in all the LXDE-native apps. For someone less "visually challenged", it will still be a snappy desktop, and they shouldn't encounter these bugs.
And the LXDE file manager is FAST. So it (and the desktop itself) makes up for not honoring the changes to the cursor. Who knows, maybe it'll be fixed some time in the future ;-p In the meantime, I'll put up with it because it really is fast over-all.
I finished cleaning off one drive last night, so I'm thinking that I might stick FreeBSD on it, and then in a month, after opensuse 12.1 gets some of the "growing pains" worked out, do a clean install as opposed to an in-place update, because it's still a decent distro. Perhaps some of the problems were related to the whole "Novell" thing ...
I also suspect that a lot of the breakage I'm experiencing is from the in-place updates which, while a great feature, show that Linux for the desktop is about where the closed-source world was 15 years ago ... and explain the (as I predicted) failure of "tumbleweed".
You said that about half of your refurbs come with XP CoA stickers ... might as well use them - it's not like XP will stop working when it's EOL'd in 2-1/2 years, and this is 2-1/2 years that those boxes can continue to run while waiting for F/LOSS to improve.
For the rest, stick whatever works under either linux or freebsd, but make sure that the new owners understand this is just for surfing the web and cross-platform stuff, like flash and java games (kind of sad that it's the "slow as molasses but it works everywhere" stuff that ends up being the better solution - and on todays "recycled boxes", even many java programs perform decently with 2 gigs of ram).
For browsers, just give them firefox and opera - none of the webkit-based browsers (including chrome) properly support css3 things like -transform (not even as -webkit-transform), and chrome changes too quickly to be considered anything but unstable.
With a setup like that, they should be able to update okay, and have no problems with running stuff. Of course, they're still going to have limited functionality for things like printing (mono lasers are pretty well supported, color lasers and multi-function devices are "not there yet"), but for surfing the web, running an ftp or http server, and for learning programming, it should be decent.
If the linux or bsd system is pushed for what it's good at, rather than as a windows replacement, it CAN make sense to a certain market segment - but they have to know what they're getting into. They've got a kid who wants to learn programming (or they do)? Then a F/LOSS stack will work. They just need webmail and surfing and an office suite? Same thing (just remember to get the video codecs from the pacman repository - there's a one-click for that for opensuse).
It's when they want to do something outside those parameters (like "Hey mom, this stupid thing can't even run $SOME_GAME") that you end up with problems. So as long as they know it's a trade-off - ("You can do a, b, and c with a windows box, or a, b, and x with a linux/bsd box), they can make the right decision. And don't under-estimate Suzy Checkout Girl - she appreciates it when someone says "here are the choices - it's your decision, so ask me any questions and I'll add them to the FAQ" :-)
She just might decide that opera and libreoffice fill 99% of her needs.
So, why not make a nice brochure explaining the differences, and let people make informed choices that can't come back to bite you in a year? And try a clean install of opensuse 11.4 - it's probably not THAT bad :-)
Oh - you might want to disable compositing if it gives you problems. Linux has good drivers for those old machines, but not necessarily under a compositing manager. You'll end up looking at a lot of black windows ...
A few big states going bankrupt would do it. (While individual states don't have a legal right to declare bankruptcy, they can declare the entire state to be one large municipal unit or instrumentality (same as you have both a city and a metropolitan area overlap), and put the resulting entity under Chapter 9 bankruptcy.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/usc_sec_11_00000101----000-.html
The resulting shock to the system would be enough to finally change priorities.
So how about actually encouraging telecommuting? Make it mandatory for most jobs that don't absolutely require a physical presence. (Hint - if it can be outsourced, it can be telecommuted).
And cut back on the #1 consumer of fuel in the world - the US Military. Use more HUMINT and less "boots on the ground".
And tell Israel to stop the lies, make peace or go it alone. If the resulting war puts a huge dent in middle east oil supplies, that's a bonus. Not to be too cynical, but long-term, a little radiation now is probably better than a runaway greenhouse effect. And if they make peace, that's that much less oil needed to fight wars.
... but you know what's NOT important, so just filter that out. As time goes on, and you update your filters, you'll find less and less unimportant stuff gets through, same as spam filters work.
Sure you can. Set it up so it parses the output and only shows you the important stuff, same as email filters. Or alternatively, have the output for each appear in its own little expandable widget in a single app.
different issues with the same distro and kde on another machine that was also running fine, but every major update kills something (wifi, sound, whatever), and recently added a random 5-second "pause" in all user input w/o anything showing in top ... which means memory corruption or some really bad programming. (and the same machine runs fine under vista, which it didn't at first ...).
Sure, I can drop back to vim, but I shouldn't HAVE to. If I can keep 100 source code files in my head, so should the stupid text editor ... if I wanted "Notepad-level" functionality, I'd just run WFW 3.11 (boot time would be what, sub-2 seconds when I tested it off a dvd a few years ago "for the LULZ" ...).
I have some backing up to finish, then it's install time. But honestly, I'd rather pay several hundred $$$ per machine to avoid these problems. And *that* is the market that open source will never be able to serve, because copyleft doesn't let people make enough money selling DEs to justify the up-front investment, and if they're "going to pay for it anyway ..."
I guess what I'm trying to say is that if anyone wants to do anything more than just surf the web and open a few emails, they'd better have a quad-core with 8 gigs of ram, and still be prepared for problems. Otherwise, just use the box as a server (in which case, BSD still fills the bill anyway, so why bother going through a jillion distros... oh well ..) because linux desktops REALLY suffer from bit-rot and bloat and what is "adequate" hardware today won't cut it in 3 years.
The linux desktop just isn't ready for prime time, and after 15 years, I don't want to waste another minute with it.
How does breeding more bees solve the problem of having too many son's of bees in most cities?
More importantly (and more seriously), this is a lawsuit waiting to happen. And no landlord is going to like you cutting holes in your windowpanes (yes, I read the original press release, not just the stupid article).
Seems it would also violate rules against the number of "pets" you're allowed to have. Also, the honey produced in an urban setting would probably have too many contaminants to be healthy.
If you read the comments on the earlier article about FreeBSD on the desktop, apparently flash is okay (no reason it shouldn't be). The various desktops are also available - you have to install them, but that's not that big a deal.
Good luck, but for consumers, the best choice probably would be to pick a distro, do an install, and then just never upgrade to the next release - just security updates. Opensuse defaults to that strategy.
You know, something like a dashboard ...
You might want to hold off on the opensuse - because lately every in-place update I've done has b0rked something. It's looking more and more like linux has equaled Windows in one area - you'll need to do a clean install instead of an update to get everything working.
Supposedly, a week from tomorrow (November 18th) Opensuse 12.1 will be out, with "over 12,000 bug fixes." Which means "Don't touch it for a month because ..."
Also, that's a polite way of saying "11.4 has over 12,000 bugs in it." And Opensuse is one of the better distros ... (sigh)
Maybe you could try your "install 3-year-old copy, update and see what breaks" with FreeBSD. Yes, they EOL previous releases, but it's because the ports collection are more like a "rolling release." I had to do an update on a few machines running 4.7 (2003) to 6.2 (2008) a few years back, so I think that covers your "3 years" scenario quite nicely - but those were servers ... YMMV.
And for the small stuff, like email, that doesn't require a horking big display, run it off a separate laptop or smart device.