Not easy to do, given that the OS can't know the dependencies of postinstalled software, unless they prohibit third-party software. Windows, OSX and Linux distros merely replacing the OS underneath the existing software either fail miserably on it or grow huge amounts of backward-compatibility layering. Sorting out that kind of thing in a clean way means recursively backtracking the full tree and refreshing every affected bit of it, and may take up many gigs of disk space and update durations in the order of days (ok, Gentoo as the prime example of a live upgrading distro is further hampered by doing everything by way of recompiles, but even binary Gentoo meta packages are sloow at upgrading).

The current way of saving the state and reinstalling is not that bad - but of course it causes friction in the case of major upgrades, where many to-be-reinstalled packages aren't there yet.


Nice to have, but I have my doubts that anybody will succeed at someting where Palm ultimately failed - the whole conduit/sync thing got more and more vulnerable as the Palms grew more complex.

Mail client database syncing was the worst invention ever, it is in utter ignorance of what servers are supposed to be good for. And Thunderbird is hardly the mail app of choice for a small screen/memory device - even Claws, which needs much less screen estate, is already somewhat hard to use on the IT.