minor typo?
It's awkward to ask- but did you mistakenly paste in 'Linux' when you meant 'XP'? I find your gripes very closely match the growing experience of trying to get work done while an umpteen-thousand automatic system and app updates choke my aging fleet of XP systems. As we've re-purposed them with Ubuntu 10.04- they spring back to life with unexpected snappy performance and many many fewer gripes about slowdowns, interruptions and app problems. The Ubuntu software center, in particular, has gathered an enthusiastic following, and to date has not locked up anyone with a failed install. By contrast, being called to run regsvr32 to manually cobble back a failed package install on Windows has turned into the new norm.
Now I want to re-watch Wayne's World II to be reminded by Garth's huge stack of Unix manuals; the reminder is that one of Microsoft's greatest accomplishments has been making Unix derivatives the easier systems to manage and make productive. Who'd have believed?
