The myth of the thousand updates for Linux, debunked

Rudd- has written in his blog about Distribution X downloading oh-so-many updates, everyday. He says:

For the last six months, I’ve been reading article after article spewing the same bovine manure: Look at how many updates Distribution X issued! How can it be more secure than Windows? Let’s bury that stupidity under a ton of facts:

“Look at the pace of the update releases!”

Microsoft shills’ latest tune goes something like this: “but Linux is so much more insecure than Windows — just look, every day you see security updates released!”.

True: open up your Linux distribution’s update manager after three months of not upgrading, and you will see quite the list. Probably a bit more than your Windows or Mac OS X updates.

But only a minority are security updates. From that minority, only a handful apply to your scenario. And even so, the number of updates is of no consequence. As a matter of fact, you should be happy you have all these updates for you to install.

Don’t just take my word for it — let’s explore why.

Linux updates: much more modular

When you update your Linux system, you’re not just updating the operating system, but system services, libraries, applications and artwork as well. In a modern Linux distribution, you can expect about a thousand quarter-of-a-megabyte discrete applications (packages), instead of ten monolithic applications.

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