> (b) You have to either learn what a DLL is and learn how to update it ... That's not at all what the process is for the ordinary person. The ordinary person

> (b) You have to either learn what a DLL is and learn how to update it ... That's not at all what the process is for the ordinary person. The ordinary person sees a notification pop-up from "Ubuntu Software Center" that says 8 packages or whatever need to updated, with one button that says "update everything now" or whatever and one that says "remind me later" or whatever. It's up to you to choose a distro that applies the appropriate amount of rigor with regards to testing dynamic library updates. For bleeding edge distros like Gentoo or Arch, it's not that much. Upstream publishes an upstream, and the Gentoo package maintainer chucks it into the testing branch. After 30 days, if no one complains, it gets marked stable. The user chooses a certain amount of risk. (although it's been several years at least since ABI breakage has been an issue for me on Gentoo testing) (note that security critical updates are fast tracked into stable) For other distros like RHEL and Debian stable, the package maintainer spends considerably more effort ensuring a random update of openssl-1.1.1i to openssl-1.1.1j doesn't break stuff. The user chooses a certain amount of stability at the expense of not having the latest version of whatever. On the other hand, on my Windows computer at work, the process for updating is significantly more intrusive. Few OS updates can be applied without a reboot, Visual Studio updates do not permit me to continue working during an update, there are half a dozen auto-updaters, and some programs which don't get updated unless I manually go to their website and check for an update. I don't know when the last time I updated 7-zip is? Within the past week, there was a bug report that Python has an RCE with untrusted floats or something. On my linux systems, the package manager had an update within hours, and because there is only one Python installation on each of my linux machines, I know that all applications leveraging Python are now protected from that RCE. On my Windows work machine, I have not been notified that any of the applications I use which embed Python need to be updated. Presumably, this means my Windows machine is vulnerable.