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I'm trying to see the benevolent aspect of these major updates that happen every 6 months, but I don't see it. Do they have to be so frequent? Do they have to b

by whyoh 6y ago

I'm trying to see the benevolent aspect of these major updates that happen every 6 months, but I don't see it. Do they have to be so frequent? Do they have to be so massive (several GB downloads)? And yet, 5 years after RTM, Windows 10 still has two control panels and an overall inconsistent UI and plenty of bugs. The whole OS is like a permanent work in progress.

jsnell 6y ago
They definitely need to be that frequent, because the less often your upgrade the more risky and painful it is. It feels like most the OS X releases are despised as buggy and breaking everything, since they try to do too much in a year. And then you have the occasional release that stabilizes things and mollifies the users. ChromeOS releases every couple of months. The changes are so incremental that it's hard to notice they even happen. And if there are breakages, they're hard to notice since it's just a couple of things rather than everything. Also, they can be fixed or rolled back quickly, since there isn't a year of other feature work built on top of whatever caused the breakage. Even six months is a little on the risky side. You'd never release a web app with that many changes piled up. Why would operating systems be different? Can't comment on the size being necessary, but at least it doesn't sound unreasonable. A Fedora upgrade is usually a couple of GB, iirc, and happens twice a year.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  Releasing too often is just churn for the sake of churn. Debian issues one stable release every two years, and it takes many months to get a release into shape after the freeze on major (system-wide) updates.
  - snazz 6y ago
    Debian is not Windows. Debian is a well-tested collection of frozen-in-time packages that receive backported security fixes (an approach that does not scale to applications the size of Chromium and Firefox). Debian doesn't have to do any marketing; stability on servers is of the utmost importance. Windows, on the other hand, "needs" to have new features annually or biannually for marketing purposes. Same with macOS and iOS. Windows is an integrated system, not a collection of packages. While I agree that constant releases are annoying, I do understand why modern software is released frequently. Companies that make money off of ad engagement (like social networks) do A/B testing to make money. This usually requires frequent updates.
tester756 6y ago
>And yet, 5 years after RTM, Windows 10 still has two control panels I'm not saying that this is good, but what's wrong with that? You cannot kill/significantly change the old one, meanwhile you want to add something more user-friendly with easy access to probably frequently used configs, what would you do?

by whyoh 6y ago

jsnell 6y ago

They definitely need to be that frequent, because the less often your upgrade the more risky and painful it is. It feels like most the OS X releases are despised as buggy and breaking everything, since they try to do too much in a year. And then you have the occasional release that stabilizes things and mollifies the users. ChromeOS releases every couple of months. The changes are so incremental that it's hard to notice they even happen. And if there are breakages, they're hard to notice since it's just a couple of things rather than everything. Also, they can be fixed or rolled back quickly, since there isn't a year of other feature work built on top of whatever caused the breakage. Even six months is a little on the risky side. You'd never release a web app with that many changes piled up. Why would operating systems be different? Can't comment on the size being necessary, but at least it doesn't sound unreasonable. A Fedora upgrade is usually a couple of GB, iirc, and happens twice a year.

zozbot234 6y ago
Releasing too often is just churn for the sake of churn. Debian issues one stable release every two years, and it takes many months to get a release into shape after the freeze on major (system-wide) updates.
- snazz 6y ago
  Debian is not Windows. Debian is a well-tested collection of frozen-in-time packages that receive backported security fixes (an approach that does not scale to applications the size of Chromium and Firefox). Debian doesn't have to do any marketing; stability on servers is of the utmost importance. Windows, on the other hand, "needs" to have new features annually or biannually for marketing purposes. Same with macOS and iOS. Windows is an integrated system, not a collection of packages. While I agree that constant releases are annoying, I do understand why modern software is released frequently. Companies that make money off of ad engagement (like social networks) do A/B testing to make money. This usually requires frequent updates.

tester756 6y ago

>And yet, 5 years after RTM, Windows 10 still has two control panels I'm not saying that this is good, but what's wrong with that? You cannot kill/significantly change the old one, meanwhile you want to add something more user-friendly with easy access to probably frequently used configs, what would you do?