If you read any of the blogs that I do, you've probably already seen Bill Gates' 2003 complaint about Windows Update. Windows Update is a piece of junk. It's always been a piece of junk. It probably always will be a piece of junk.

What's really disappointing is that it doesn't have to be. Take a look at the package manager in Ubuntu Linux. It's probably the same in many other flavors of Linux, but I don't have experience with them.

Anyway, package manager is simple. When there are new versions of software or new patches to the operating system, it puts a little notification in my taskbar. When I click the notification, it tells me what is available for update. It even separates them into recommended vs optional, and tells me a little bit about each update. I can choose some, all, or none of the updates to apply. When it's finished updating, sometimes I have to restart. It puts another notification in the taskbar, and then that's it. I can restart when I'm ready.

Windows, on the other hand, is much more obnoxious. By default, it doesn't want to tell me what it's doing. When it finishes, it pops up a window that tells me to restart now or later. If I say later, it pops up again in a couple of minutes. And again. And again. Look, Microsoft, sometimes I'm at work and don't have the time to restart. Sometimes I'm in the middle of something and just don't feel like restarting. Why can't I have that option? Why can't you just show me a little "You need to restart at some point" notification and leave it at that?

And we're not even talking about Vista here. This is XP on my work computer. And the only reason Windows is on the computer at all is because it's a work computer.

I've restarted now, and everything seems to be fine. I don't know what update it did, but everything still works, so it can't have been too big a deal. Nice to see Microsoft still patching XP - I guess they realize that Vista sucks, and most people who don't have to upgrade haven't (and won't).

Download Day 2008 is coming. We're just not sure when.

They're trying to set a world record for software downloads in a day. Since you should be using Firefox 3 as soon as it comes out, this is a great opportunity.

In case you haven't tried Firefox, it is light years ahead of Internet Explorer. Even IE7, which Microsoft put out to implement a bunch of functionality that's been in Firefox and other browsers for quite some time, is a steaming pile of crap compared to Firefox.

Anyway, join in. It'll be fun to watch the Mozilla Foundation's servers melt with the download traffic.

I tried out Fedora for a few minutes. The Gnome desktop looks just like Ubuntu. I'm going to do some research and see what the real differences are.

When I rebooted into Ubuntu, I had some upgrades to install, which I did. One of them popped up this message:

A security certificate which was automatically created for your local system needs to be replaced due to a flaw which renders it insecure. This will be done automatically.

If you don't know anything about this, you can safely ignore this message.

That's pretty awesome.

I've been pretty underwhelmed by Ubuntu 8.04 - Hardy Heron. I upgraded from 7.10, which I was pretty happy with, and I'd kind of like to go back. I haven't been getting crashes or freezes or anything like that, but it's not more polished and stable than 7.10.

Also, Firefox 3 Beta is annoying. A couple of the plugins I really like for Firefox 2 don't work yet, and the new features aren't cool enough to make it worth the upgrade for me.

I also suspect some of my dissatisfaction is not 8.04's fault - the lack of 64 bit Linux support in Adobe's Flash is a huge pain. There are some websites that just don't work without Flash (Some of them, like Google Analytics, are actually useful). And I can't get Flash to work anymore. But it wasn't working in 7.10, either.

Anyway, I just downloaded and burned a live cd for Fedora 9, and I think I'm going to try it out. I don't know if I'll replace Ubuntu, but it's worth a try. I can still be a smug Linux convert with Fedora. Maybe even smugger because Ubuntu is more mainstream than Fedora.