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Ask HN: Why have OS updates become so aggressive?

• therealidiot 10y ago
  User choice has gone out of fashion
• rman666 10y ago
  Uh, security?
• runjake 10y ago
  (This is meant to be a serious, non-snarky answer.) Because the "move fast and break things" of app development has hit the mainstream and crossed over into the OS. It allows for faster iteration at the expense of some stability and familiarity.
• twunde 10y ago
  Two highly correlated reasons. 1) It speeds up the pace of innovation and change as these companies can now receive rapid feedback and see what works and what doesn't. 2) It heavily reduces the maintenance requirements as Apple is only supporting a relatively small number of platforms. By reducing the number of platforms supported, the companies can then reallocate those resources that would have been doing bug fixes on adding brand new features to the latest version. These all allow the marketing arms of these companies to crow about the new features they've added. Think about it this way. Chrome's major innovation was being the first browser to rapidly update itself. That allowed it to quickly leapfrog over IE and Mozilla since they could push out many more changes over the same period of time AND those changes would be more likely to be stable. It also eliminated the need to support old versions like IE 6 with security fixes
  • pfranz 10y ago
    Unfortunately, that's not always good for the user. There are things I do like once a year; update my drivers license online, for example. If the web site is "good enough" and never updated, then great, I know how long it will take and what steps to take--I may even have automated most of it. If they change the website every 6 months with wiz-bang features I have to relearn it, I have no idea how long it'll take, and it may not even work. A web service is kind of a bad example since it require managing a backend. To my parents, opening a spreadsheet or listening to music is the same. They lack the lexicon to discover newer interface trends like the hamburger icon, or ribbon interface. Many people used IE6 because there was a huge investment in it. I agree it was terrible to support and write against, but I don't see any problem with using a payroll system that was written 10 years ago and dependant on IE6 if your needs haven't changed. It seems silly to constantly update or completely rewrite something that's working just fine if needs haven't changed. It just sucks that they would use the same browser for payroll as they do for browsing the Internet.
  • flukus 10y ago
    > 1) It speeds up the pace of innovation and change as these companies can now receive rapid feedback and see what works and what doesn't. This is exactly the sort of thing most users don't want.
• jandrese 10y ago
  Because if you don't push users to update they won't. And then they'll be owned by a 6 month old security vulnerability in a random drive by malware advertisement or internet worm or whatever and their machine will join yet another botnet. It's designed to make not updating as difficult as updating so neglectful users don't default to not updating.
  • saurik 10y ago
    To the extent to which operating systems manufacturers care about this, they then need to address the actual problem: that operating system upgrades are not just useful security fixes but also "the entire computer now has a different user interface and no longer supports not only some of the software I was using but some of the hardware I rely on" (I know someone who upgraded to a new version of Mac OS X which rendered the $1000 multitrack mixer he uses for his recording job non-functional, and has since sworn off of updating anything ever, and I simply can't blame him).
    • ninju 10y ago
      Anecdotal evidence of updates causing issues can be countered with example of where Windows Defender updates prevented virus, keyloggers and other malware from infecting computers. It is an unfortunate reality that we live a world where people are actively pursuing ways to infect and control our personal computers. The software (OS makers in particular) are doing their best to react/respond to the threats as they are discovered and identified. It is continual game of cat & mouse
      • saurik 10y ago
        What? No: you cannot "counter" an experience with a non-experience. Users often directly experience the pain of upgrading. This teaches them to avoid upgrading. Users cannot directly experience the pain of not upgrading: that isn't a thing they can experience. At some time fundamentally uncorrelated to their decision to not upgrade an event which may or may not have been prevented if they upgraded happens to them (and that's assuming they even understand what is going on! usually this manifests as "computer is running slower"). This is like trying to teach someone to take extreme safety precautions around the magic glowing green rock that you insist will make them get sick and die thirty years later if they don't follow some exacting procedure that involves wearing a suit with a mask that actively hurts to wear: one with sharp edges which cuts their face and has even on multiple times left them with a scar. Sure: maybe you can try to spend a bunch of time teaching this person about radiation, but there are billions of them and they don't care. You can force them to wear the suit and make their lives painful and shitty. Or maybe you can admit to yourself that "maybe I am part of the problem" and make the suit not actively hurt to wear. You can't get rid of the suit, but we can at least decrease the attrition as much as possible. As far as I am concerned, Apple (and I am not neccessarily saying they are unique: only that I only can explicity state at them as I have been so centrally in their ecosystem for the past decade) actively scorns their "uneducated" users, refusing to accept any blame for the people who don't upgrade, and this is whether you are examining at their actual engineering practices, consuming their marketing messages ("be courageous"), or you talk to them in person (my favorite so far being someone who told me they are proud to work there as Apple is willing to tell our users that they are just afraid of the future and will need to adjust). And again: even looking past this problem (that you really can't "counter" experience with non-experience), providing "stable" upgrades as the default that do not push people to do major upgrades with totally-unrelated massive user interface changes or gratuitously incompatible architecture breakages. Does this take time and thought? Yes. But if you aren't doing this, you--not the user!--are directly responsible for any loss of life or property that results from users not upgrading. (FWIW, this is actually related in an interesting way to how people in my country, America, do not trust scientists. Rather than attempting to increase trust in science among the general population, which is the reason why countries that have high vaccination rates are where they are, people would prefer to blame the uneducated masses--end users who are constantly being jerked around by popular science reporting who are probably just sick of being told about stuff that never happens or being told to do first one thing and then the opposite next year--and legislate them into forced compliance :/.)
• subway 10y ago
  Users are lazy and if you don't force them to update, they won't. Then they get owned. Then they talk shit about you. Why not make the world a better place, push the updates hard, and just jump to the shit talking? ;)
  • user5994461 10y ago
    That is true for security updates which are critical and it makes sense to 'force' them. But that is not a valid excuse to force major version upgrade like win8 => win10. It has little to do with security and it forces a different environment onto the user.
    • serge2k 10y ago
      > It has little to do with security It does when you start to talk about unsupported versions.
      • user5994461 10y ago
        No excuse. There are still many years of support ahead for win8. (and even win7) If you wanna talk about unsupported stuff, talk about the printer drivers that do not exist on the new OS version.
      • altstar 10y ago
        Windows 8.1 are still supported.
      • pfranz 10y ago
        It can also break compatibility. I built a PC for the first time in probably 10 years. I went with Windows 10, but most of the my stuff didn't have drivers and support. I couldn't tell if things were broken or just didn't have driver support. I cobbled together a version of Windows 7 to make sure everything worked, then moved back to Windows 10. South Park Studios still uses an image compositor called Shake. It's cross platform (OSX, Windows, Linux) and Apple stopped development in 2008, but they still use Shake to make new episodes. There's a good chance it won't run on the latest version of the operating system, but they've made a huge investment in software and hardware that works fine. Forcing and update would shut down production.
• emp_zealoth 10y ago
  Last night Windows 10 popped up a notification while i was gaming "Windows 10 is going to restart in 3 minutes with options "Now" and "Cancel". I clicked cancel and 15 minutes later it just restarted in my face, while i was ACTIVELY using it, no notification, no popup, just blam, 1,5h of updates. I might have been doing a project and lost half a day of my work just as well. Now I have to go and take all permisions away from Reboot service in Windows 10 Also it keeps adding fucking Edge and Store to my quickbar every single update Is Microsoft retarded? How can this be a good idea
  • gtirloni 10y ago
    I have never experienced this with Windows 10. Every time I said 'no' to reboot, it never rebooted. It only re-added Edge/Store to the taskbar after major updates (that is, the first one and the anniversary update). It never did that on Patch Tuesday for random updates. I wonder what's different between your and my computer. Are you using Home, Pro, Enterprise or Education edition? I'm on Pro here.
    • pfranz 10y ago
      I'm running 8.1 Pro here at work and the exact same thing happened to me. We generally run the computers disconnected from the Internet. I had connected to the Internet, came back to my desk to see a countdown dialog, rushed to click "Cancel." About 10 minutes later the computer was forcibly shut down to install updates. I figured, "might as well get all these updates out of the way." So after that round of updates installed it said it needed to restart in order to install updates. After that I checked for updates and it needed to restart a third time. I hadn't used Windows since XP and forgot how many times you need to reboot and how often updates get released (I'm used to Linux and MacOS). The aggressiveness is also very annoying--bordering on making things unreliable.
      • gtirloni 10y ago
        You may have a bunch of pending security updates that can't be delayed any longer. Plus, if you're missing more than one of the 'big updates', it'll reboot many times. The anniversary updates alone will reboot 2-3x. I don't know for how long you have been disconnected, but it's to be expected the updates will pile up and will have to be dealt with at some point. I'm dual booting Fedora and Windows 10 and I get way fewer updates on Windows than on Linux (every single day there's a new update). I've left a laptop with Fedora alone for 2 months and when I booted it, there were 1.4GB of updates. Personally I like the bug fixes, improvements and security fixes. I think it's a fair trade-off (on whatever platform you're -- I get app updates on my Android phone every other day).
• aphextron 10y ago
  Because hackers have become so aggressive. It's no longer just clandestine groups of anonymous people working through the internet. There are industrial scale state-sponsored hacking efforts across the world now, actively focused on exploiting every single release of every single OS, and it's only getting worse. Also, with the wide scale adoption of broadband internet it's become possible to adopt an "evergreen" model for OS updates now, much like browsers have been doing for years.
• executive 10y ago
  Windows 10 Home is brutal. There is no group policy editor. Workaround is set each WiFi you use as a "Metered Connection" which will avoid updates.
• abramN 10y ago
  Has no one realized that Microsoft and others are moving to a SaaS model, even with consumer OSes? Lots of other service providers update their platforms, and the user doesn't really have much say in WHEN it happens. We just get a message that the vendor is updating the software during a maintenance window, and that's that. 10,20 years from now we'll be subscribing to all of our software, and we will just be told when that software is going to update. We may also see something similar to what the Playstation does - ok, don't update now if you don't want to, but that means you can't use any network features! But either way, prepare for a new way to look at the applications running on your PC.