It honestly wasn't so much of a bother. Updates were really the only pain point but then programs received updates periodically at best. (Talking dial-up era he

It honestly wasn't so much of a bother. Updates were really the only pain point but then programs received updates periodically at best. (Talking dial-up era here) The cost of distribution motivated developers to release much higher-quality code, relatively-speaking, as not doing so cost you more (in terms of disks+shipping, additional bandwidth, etc) and well as earned a much greater amount of ire from your users. If you were smart you had a system for dealing with migrating between computers. Maybe it was a script, maybe you knew which folders to copy, maybe you were extra careful with where you saved everything. Maybe you didn't care. Some of the modern shit is nice (I fondly</s> remember setting up a personal Active Directory+Exchange server to get a private LDAP sync, compared to Google now) but as a whole the current model encourages carelessness and mindless profiteering. There's too much of the equation nowadays in control of people who want to charge you for it, whereas before the user was had control. I miss the days when it was considered rude to require a network connection unnecessarily. Plus, nowadays a product you love can turn to mush and there's nothing you can do about it save stop paying for it (and lose its services in the process), which will never amount to anything unless people do it en mass. Features regularly disappear because some bullshit business reason or another, or some user metric said only 2% of people used it. Well, fuck those 2% guys right?!? Before, if I didn't like your patch I could just revert to the old install discs. Nowadays I have to pray you don't alter your deal further. edit: and don't get me wrong, as a developer the evergreen model is great. But as a power user, I hate it. edit2: not to say older software didn't have its crap. Lots of fussy stuff to deal with. But compare the initial release of Windows 3.1 to Windows 10...