On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 04:51:39PM -0700, Gary L. Roach wrote: [...]
> Miacopa All is well, and sorry if my tone was... rough. > I think I was venting. I am so frustrated with this whole Dolphin > mess that I may have gone overboard [...] I feel your pain. Not from KDE land, but I think it's a basic problem. We are being torn apart by the attempt to democratize free software (which is something we *must* attempt!). Making things user friendly (something we *gotta* do) means sometimes taking decisions for the user. Where's the limit? Where's too much (authoritarian software)? Where's too litle (RTFM software)? You'll be wrong most of the time for some users, and some of the time for most users. As an example: yesterday, I got a laptop from a customer. Doesn't boot. Thinkpad something something, with Ubuntu on it. Now I think it's so awesome that a psychotherapist runs Ubuntu for his business. He gets a special price. What was the problem? Basically a b0rked kernel upgrade[1], where the corresponding Intel CPU firmware was missing. The two youngest kernels in the Grub menu didn't boot, the third oldest did (though I found about that in a somewhat roundabout way: it seems at least 80% of our profession consists of barking up the wrong tree, but I disgress). Back to our topic: this customer has auto-upgrade running. While his box was up and running, it did two (!) kernel updates without the owner even noticing[2]. This is an incredible luxury, but in this case the effect was that after the next shutdown the box didn't boot, with no obvious reason for him. What is "the right" degree of automation? Finding an adequate answer to this will be our job for the next ~20 years. I don't expect a scalar number as answer :-) Cheers [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/intel-microcode/+bug/1882890 [2] "But there was this notification saying the box needs a reboot, blah, blah" you'll say. Yeah, right. -- tomás
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