Patching

There are very few Operating Systems that have an adequate patching process for applications. The only two I recommend to someone who is too busy to track all of their installed applications is FreeBSD and Debian GNU/Linux. Apparently you can do this with [RedhatDependencies RedHat] and its offspring, but I've heard too many issues with "dependancy hell" to ever recommend this distribution. With Debian it's as simple as "apt-get install update && apt-get install upgrade" and all of your installed applications will now be up to date! With FreeBSD it's a little more complex. I've created two shell scripts which I've named update, and upgrade. You will need portsnap, portaudit and portupgrade installed to use these:

#!/bin/sh

# update

/usr/local/sbin/portsnap fetch && /usr/local/sbin/portsnap update && pkg_version -v -l "<"

#EOF

#!/bin/sh

# upgrade

portaudit -F && portaudit

portupgrade -a

#EOF

Rumour has it that OpenBSD is building a portupgrade tool, and I will surely switch to them at that point, based on their security history.