itsraining

Yes, but Chromium is very easy to embed in applications. Mozilla has a history of creating and then abandoning embedding APIs every few years or so (and right now I think they have none).

Reminds me of this: http://toastycode.com/besavers/buynow.html

Not per se, but Thunderbird is supposedly collaborating with the K-9 team to make K-9 the mobile version of Thunderbird.

HP – Hell-Powered

HP printers are just bad. Their Linux drivers (HPLIP) are flimsy and sometimes break on updates. They come with GUI tools still stuck on Qt 4. Their hardware's quality is also pitiful and the marketing approarch is outirght evil. I got an Envy printer recently (not my choice). It came with instructions to set it up via cloud with an HP account. Why shouldn't I be able to use a damn printer without creating yet another useless account and giving out personal information is beyond me. At last I discovered the USB port (covered by a sticker which had the word USB crossed out) and managed to set up the printer after the fifth attempt or so, because CUPS didn't recognize it and so didn't the HPLIP setup tool. And then the next time I tried to use the printer it just refused... Then I gave it away because my patience had finally run out. Don't mess with HP if you value your time and nerves.

I hope more manufacturers would adopt the Blackberry style of phones. Titan Pocket has proved that you can have Android running decently on such a device. So why not bring back QWERTY keyboards?

Thank you for answering. I can relate to manually updating my parents' systems once in a while but at this point I'm seriously considering unattended upgrades (updating over SSH is also a good idea).

Yes, probably because I stick with Arch and Slackware plus a lightweight environment. The only time I saw such a GUI was when I tried out Elementary just for fun.

What I consider a problem is that the user can simply dismiss or disregard the updates notification indefinitely. I know many non-tech-savvy people who do not understand the importance of updates, so they would be inclined to do exactly that. That is why unattended upgrades are probably a better option in such cases.

What do you mean, automatically? Arch is a rolling release and I have to explicitly run pacman with the correct flags to update. At the same time Debian, which is not a rolling release, has the unattended upgrades feature which installs updates automatically.

But indeed, many things depend on the distro. For example, user-centric distros such as Elementary and others provide an easy to use GUI for updating the system.

And yes, Windows Updates was (is still? not a Win user) a nightmare.

That would be true if:

1. A GUI software center is used (or if the said dad is comfortable with an interactive console application)
2. The said dad actually realizes the importance behind updates. From my experience, many people don't.

So, unless both of above are true, the dad will never (want to) update his system because "it works as is", sticking to old versions of software, never receiving bugfixes and neglecting security.

I say we

If I may ask, how do you deal with updates? Have you enabled unattended upgrades or do you update the machines yourself?

I say we boycott Windows