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Acer likes Linux for laptops (c|net)Acer likes Linux for laptops (c|net)Posted Jun 6, 2008 17:19 UTC (Fri) by oak (guest, #2786)In reply to: Acer likes Linux for laptops (c|net) by drag Parent article: Acer likes Linux for laptops (c|net)
I think the main issue is security. If the manufacturers don't push their changes aggressively to upstream and use some very well maintained distro (one of the larger ones) with automated security updates and server (mirror) infra than can take tens of millions new users, this could well fail. Minor distros might not have the resources necessary to deal with things like this, distribution fragmentation can mean that there's no common understanding of how the security is maintained (e.g. news casters in TV gravely announcing a new quickly spreading security threat and telling what to do / not to do like happens for Windows :-)). Laptop manufacturer specific distros won't work at all. They would just blame "Linux" for day-one security issues and it would be mainly Linux which "brand" would be tarnished, not the incompetent manufacturer.
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Acer likes Linux for laptops (c|net) Posted Jun 7, 2008 4:46 UTC (Sat) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link] I agree - I hear from an eee user that the security updates were quite slow to appear though they are now speeding up. Something like Debian or Ubuntu's "unattended-upgrades" package is required - runs regularly and installs all security updates that don't need user intervention - combined with a GUI based notifier to restart the system for kernel updates, restart Firefox for its updates, etc. Restart notification is a weak area in Linux distros that I've seen - the user has to really know which apps to restart, rather than the system looking at running processes and advising them which ones to restart to pick up patches. I can't work out why the manufacturers are being so short-sighted about security updates and the other benefits of being with a mainstream distro. Using Ubuntu, Fedora or even PCLinuxOS would not cost them any more and would get them access to a much larger community and support infrastructure. Perhaps the forthcoming Ubuntu Netbook Remix will help matters, but it will be tough for Canonical to replace an existing working distro on such products.
Acer likes Linux for laptops (c|net) Posted Jun 8, 2008 14:09 UTC (Sun) by felixrabe (guest, #50514) [Link] "would not cost them any more" I have to say that I find that statement, if implemented as stated, rather short-sighted as well. Rather, laptop manufacturers should cooperate financially in some appropriate way so that the infrastructure maintenance won't take the distributor down because of some third-party "mass deployment".
Acer likes Linux for laptops (c|net) Posted Jun 8, 2008 15:23 UTC (Sun) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link]
At least I wouldn't trust some foobar HW manufacturer to excel in security
(or packaging quality needed for dist-upgrades or...) more than a Linux
vendor which has done that successfully already for several years. The
manufacturer could then also market their product with something
like "security updates provided by well-known <name>^{tm} Linux
distribution".
Acer likes Linux for laptops (c|net) Posted Jun 12, 2008 16:44 UTC (Thu) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link] I was assuming that the laptop vendor would at least provide some mirror capacity to help overall, or even dedicated mirrors. That doesn't really change based on the distro, but it may be they haven't factored in the cost of mirror servers to their business model. Also, I heard somewhere that Xandros updates are very slow, maybe once a year for security updates - if this is true, it's another reason to go with a mainstream distro. Sorting out mirror capacity is much easier than sorting out security updates that are lagging massively behind mainstream distros (and Microsoft).
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