← Back to team overview

unity-design team mailing list archive

Re: Updates on Login

 

On 07/06/2009 08:21 PM, David Siegel wrote:


Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
Alex Launi wrote:
On Sat, Jul 4, 2009 at 4:03 AM, Mark Shuttleworth <mark@xxxxxxxxxx <mailto:mark@xxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:

    Updates-on-login are interesting, but I think fatally flawed
    because of the common requirement to reboot after updates.


This is actually the case where update on login works best. Any other time rebooting is totally interruption. You're working, you need to decide whether or not rebooting is important enough, and then if you do decide to reboot, you need to save all of your state, and actually do the deed. Immediately after boot you don't have this problem. Instead of starting to work and then being disturbed, you delay starting until you can really start, without interruption.

's a fair point.

Also, as there is no user state before login, we can reboot the machine without user confirmation. With fast-boot and KMS, we completely remove the pain from rebooting after updates -- in fact, the user probably won't even notice the reboot (we should suppress startup sounds on the reboot).


This is a really good point. We would do well to remember that users don't get frustrated simply at rebooting, their frustration is delaying their ability to *use* their desktop. Time and the appearance of more time is the source of the problem with rebooting, not the fact that a machine needs to cycle due to a kernel update or whatever.

--
Joshua Blount // Ubuntu One // http://launchpad.net/~jblount


Follow ups

References