[Desktop_architects] Effectiveness of various distros' autoupdate systems

[Mike Hearn]

> 57 to 71 percent updated after five days isn't
> too bad... but it's not great, either, in our hostile
> world.   Shouldn't we be able to do better?

I'd be interested to see the same experiment repeated against Chrome :-)

> Also, looking at the raw data, it looks like ~10% of users
> are just not into updating at all, they're running wildly old
> browsers (like Firefox 2.x or Firefox 3.0.0).

Perhaps somebody set up Linux for them but didn't give them root, or
didn't set up automatic online updates? I guess it's not rare for
people to give Linux installs to family members, etc.

It's kind of disturbing that the figures are so high even for your own
site, which presumably is visited primarily by technical people.

> As far as I know, no distro has set security updates
> to default to be applied unattended.  Not even Windows
> does that,

Pretty sure it does install updates automatically by default and has
done for a long time. But you are prompted for the defaults when you
install it, so I guess it really depends on what OEMs do.

At any rate, what Windows does is irrelevant IMHO. The number of
botnets built on top of exploits fixed months or even years ago is
staggering. The default being automatic installs seems like the only
responsible way forward.

As an interesting thought experiment in "what would happen if desktop
Linux took over the world?", here's some stats from Wikipedia on the
scale of Windows Update:



As of 2008, Windows Update has about 500 million clients, processes
about 350 million unique scans per day, and maintains an average of
1.5 million simultaneous connections to client machines.[12] On Patch
Tuesday, the day Microsoft typically releases new software updates,
outbound traffic can exceed 500 gigabits per second. Approximately 90%
of all clients use automatic updates to initiate software updates,
with the remaining 10% using the Windows Update web site. The web site
is built using ASP.NET, and processes an average of 60,000 page
requests per second.