Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
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.