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?

Comments

Update slow ...

[gstoddart]

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.