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Ask Slashdot: How Often Do You Update Your OS?
An anonymous reader writes: A couple friends of mine have been having a debate recently. One is constantly updating all of his operating systems (desktop, phone, and otherwise), often as soon as a new patch is available. He tries betas and nightlies. He has a different ROM on his phone every other week. The other friend is much more conservative with his updates. Once his systems are running smoothly, he wants to leave them alone for as long as possible. He'll do some serious security updates, but he's extremely wary of anything involving major UI changes or functionality differences. What's your preference? Are you constantly tweaking? Waiting for the early adopters to work out the kinks? How does your preference change between work machines and personal machines?
Whenever I have some of the most expensive and valuable resource to waste - my time. If it is up and working, security updates go in, after 2 to 3 weeks, other updates may go with them as well, but not necessary. I would rather be out on my bicycle or working on my photo collection ( sometimes I take 3-4k photos on a weekend) than doing updates. Keep in mind, the summary talks about upgrades - the new rom every week. Update is keeping the same version, upgrade is moving to another.
This is an issue that I think is handled beautifully by Ubuntu's release system. LTS releases come out on a relatively steady schedule, with bleeding-edge releases in between. I personally stick with LTS releases, which come out often enough to keep me up to date with features, etc., but without lots of things breaking all the time.
And, yes, I like Unity very much.
Let the suckers and adventurers be the beta testers.
Don't run the crap which is most likely to be causing you security problems in the first place -- I've never been impacted by a Flash zero day exploit because I don't run it.
Many years of being around computers has taught me that I have no intention of putting up with the drama of beta testing for companies who do a lousy job of QA.
I've seen WAY too many things which are broken on day 1, or even worse, which introduce new broken on day 1 that it takes some time to identify.
There isn't an OS vendor on the planet I'd accept a fresh release from and install on the first day.
If you do this stuff as a hobby, have fun with it. The rest of us don't have the time or the inclination to consider upgrading the OS to be a hobby.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The answer is simple: hipsters don't design car user interfaces, but they do "design" software user interfaces.
It may be difficult to believe these days, but for quite some time, from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s, software UIs were quite consistent on each major platform. Almost all Windows apps looked the same on any given version of Windows. Almost all Mac apps looked the same on any given version of Mac OS. Even on X, where there was no standard toolkit, at least a Motif-like theme was offered by most toolkits. There was even superficial similarity across these very different platforms, where the UIs consisted of very similar components, even if the appearance differed.
The important thing to remember is that all of that software predated the influx of hipsters into the computing industry. The hipsters flooded in starting around 2005, which corresponds exactly to the decline in user interface consistency. After a few years of work, these hipsters left us with UI disasters like all of modern web design (especially Slashdot Beta), Chrome, Firefox 4 and later, GNOME 3, and Windows 8.
Hipsters care only about the appearance of the UI. The usability of the software is not a concern to them. The appearance is what they deem to look "good", of course. So if, as a user, you find that the software looks bad and is difficult to use, then the hipsters insist that you are wrong and they are right.
Gedit is the best example I've seen of how the hipster approach to "design" can totally destroy a software user interface. Gedit, which is nothing more than a simple Notepad-like text editor, went from having consistent, usable interface to having this terrible farce of a user interface. That's right, they managed to fuck up the user interface of a text editor that badly!
At least the auto industry, in general, has kept these hipsters away from the physical dashboard. Yes, they have screwed up some of the software for in-car screens, but at least that functionality is non-critical.
It's the extortion model of OS pricing.
"Lovely little computer you have here. Shame if it got broken in an update. Just buy a little insurance and you can avoid all that."
Automotive control interfaces change all of the time.
But in most cases, the automobile someone drivers does not.
And when someone does change car, maybe every 5-10 years, getting up to speed with the new controls takes them a few minutes.
This is because, fair as the examples you give of evolving car controls might be, ultimately you still turn the steering wheel to change direction (and you turn it anticlockwise to turn left). When you get a different car, you still have the same gas and brake pedals you used to. If you drive a manual then you still have the same clutch pedal and probably a near-identical gear stick arrangement. The range of external lights and when you use them hasn't changed a lot in decades. The internal and external environment-related controls are still roughly the same. The changes are mostly cosmetic, more akin to changing visual themes in software than changing actual functionality to something significantly different that the user must then learn before they can use the software effectively again.
If software only changed its UI significantly every 5-10 years, and you could choose when to switch, and when you did it would still basically work the same way but you might have to spend five minutes figuring out where the main functions were found in the new version, I don't think users would be nearly as frustrated by the changes as so many are today.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I also have a friend who upgrades everything all the time. "the new phone's amazing" either means that the "old phone sucks" -- which makes no sense since the old phone was "amazing" when it was new too -- or that the new marketing is amazing -- which makes sense because the old marketing was also amazing.
There are countly amazing things that can be added to anything. Some new features are just really impressive. But being impressive doesn't mean that it improves my life at all.
A frisbee that can be thrown over a half-mile is really cool (and called an aerobe, by the way, and I love them) but I don't have a park that large, nor would I enjoy playing catch with a friend that far away.
Similarly, most new OS features might be neat, but they don't actually change my life at all. Perhaps the best example I can give is with regard to office/productivity suites.
Between word, excel, wordperfect, lotus 123, and-if-you-thought-wordperfect-was-dating-myself wordstar, I've been writing essays and poems and business documents for close to thirty years. Before the computer "clipboard", before 3d text-art, before pivot tables, before ribbon bars, before toolbars, before menu bars, before arrow-keys, even before the mouse. In the end, the business documents that I produce today, to earn a living, aren't any more sophistimicated than the ones that I producted 25 years ago, early in my career. Believe it or not, youngin's, business invoices and quotes and proposals existing before XML. So none of these new features actually provide any additional benefit to my life. They only change the way I create the very same invoice -- whether for dot-matrix, inkjet, laser, PDF, or e-mail.
How many new OS features actually add to my life? The answer is: none. So I upgrade my OS when I upgrade my computer. When is that? When my computer is too old to play the almost-latest games -- because games are entertainment, and entertainment is my sole purpose in life.
The OS is very definitely secondary.
All that said, there have been OS upgrades that have improved my life. Win 95 let me switch between games and work faster, which meant that I could play more games. Vista let me have more pixels so I could work more at a time and keep the tv playing in the corner at the same time. Win 7 added nothing. Win 8 added nothing. Win 10 would let me work cross-device better, if my work were capable of being done anywhere but a desk, but it ain't.
Just sounds like you are getting old and seeing that is is fatiguing to learn the same thing over and over again... I mean it is, but that is computing in general. I grew up with DOS and norton commander, then we hit windows 3.1 to learn things, then windows 95x and upwards. Even between windows versions everything shuffled around and I had to relearn where it all was.
Back in college I finally got some unix/linux command line experience, had to learn some stuff there but nothing too deep. In the working world I was back to windows for a while, but a new job got me stuck on OSX and once again had to relearn everything, then back to ubuntu again (What asshole greenlit those scroll bars and 1px target to resize a window?!) and learning more and more.
Oh yeah, there is also the ipad, ipod, iphone, and android devices with their own OS's and quirks to learn too. Not to mention console dashboards and navigating around their social networking features.
I mean, it all keeps changing, and some new stuff sucks, but overall, I think its getting better. I find myself just as lost as I've always been, but the answer is usually auto completed for me when I start typing it into google, I don't even have to search through 30 pages of altavista to find a good webring to browse for good information.
I mean taking the editor, yeah some suck, but some are great, sublime text for example, it is pretty hipster like, but damn, it was really built for people like me. I like keyboard shortcuts but I like GUI's a lot as well and sublime seems to marry the two really well.
So yeah, software changes, more and more TYPES of people are building software for more types of people, there is a lot of crap out there, but filtered out, the gems are really great gems.