Release upgrading requiring user input baffles inexperienced users

Dear Ubuntu people,

I have several inexperienced friends using Ubuntu. This week, and the previous one, they tried to upgrade to Precise Pangolin through the GUI: update-manager pops up, they are told there is a new release, 12.04, and they click on "Upgrade".

After all the packages are downloaded, though, often the process stops in the middle of installing packages. One common case almost all my friends stumble at, is near the beginning, when an obscure (for them) list of services is presented, and they are asked if to "restart" them. They have:

a) no idea what a service is. What is stuff like "rsync"? "libc"? They're scared a wrong decision might break their machine.

b) many of them have left their machine unattended for the past hours. They are surprised that in 6-7 hours the process is still in its early stages and unfinished! They want to use their machine! They're not only scared, but angry, too!

c) the window presented to them is a ncurses one. It has no focus. They try to type with the keyboard, and nothing happens. After a while, they try to clic on the "Ok" button (even though they do not know it is a button). It doesn't work. They panic and call me. I tell them to try to clic on the lower part of the update manager screen, and to press "TAB" until "Ok" is selected. They cannot tell when it is selected reliably. In the end I have to keep a level tone and ask them to be cool, and have a laugh, as they would like to unplug the computer in frustration. They are scared they will never be able to recover the documents that were there before, but they do not know how to proceed.

Up until now, the list of affected friends includes my own mother (she's 57 years old, Italian, and owns her own PC), my girlfriend (25 years old, she is German, has a laptop running Ubuntu), and a friend of mine (he is 21 years old, Argentinian, and has a PC). So it looks people of different ages, culture and gender stumble into this problem :-p.

Of course, the situation is less than optimal. This reminds me of a discussion Richard Hughes of PackageKit's fame had with Debian devs some time ago [1], about debconf requiring user input during an upgrade process. I didn't get back then how much this is a *bad* idea. As far as I know, rpm does it without user input, and creates a series of ".rpmnew" config files when needed. Then, at the end of the installation process, notifies the users there is some manual configuration to be done. I think this is the right way to handle the issue. If not upgrading a config file will result in the relative package to stop working, then a ".rpmold" file is forced to be created, so that no info is lost.

Please, to avoid people calling their "expert" friends and make it really "Linux for everyone", could you please make the *UPGRADE* process *NON-INTERACTIVE*?

[1] http://wiki.debian.org/PackageKit/Discussion
"Authentication or license prompts can only be done before the transaction has started, and messages or notices about the transaction can only be shown after the transaction has completed"