Notifying end-users when support is no more

[Alec Wright]

On Mon, 2007-01-01 at 13:04 -0600, Conrad Knauer wrote:
> On 1/1/07, t u <towsonu2003 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Today, I booted to Windows after 4-5 months. Because of my switch to
> > Linux, I have been behaving like an average Windows user, not going
out
> > of my way to protect the OS.
> >
> > A pop up appeared and told me that my AVG free anti-virus 7.1 will
not
> > be updated ever again after Jan 15th, and that I should update to
7.5.
> > Without this pop up, however annoying, I would not have known that I
> > will not be getting any security updates. That would leave me
vulnerable
> > to everything out there...
> >
> > I think our end-users who do not like to go out of their way to
learn
> > about what's going on in the community could really use such a
feature.
> >
> > This idea was discussed before, but nothing happened. So I wanted to
> > attract your attention to this issue again.
> >
> > At the least, if it is do-able, for desktop users, you could change
the
> > background picture to something that says "upgrade because your
current
> > version will not get security updates within 1 month."... or maybe a
pop
> > up by update-manager? I suspect that server users are more
> > security-savvy and don't need such intervention.
> 
> I don't think that a large-window pop-up or changing the background
> image is the way to go though; why not just a notification area icon
> like when it informs us that updates are available, with a balloon
> similar to how it informs us that a restart is required?
> 
> CK
> 
+1 to that. When you click on the bubble, it should send you to a page
telling you about how to upgrade and which version to upgade to (eg
stable or LTS).