10 ms·

That dialog also invokes so many issues with computers today. When I open a program, I want to use that program. I don't want to update it, I don't want to see

That dialog also invokes so many issues with computers today. When I open a program, I want to use that program. I don't want to update it, I don't want to see all the new features, I want to USE it. I opened it because I had a task to complete and all this junk is getting in my way. And same when I close a program, as the author hits on very well. Basically, the computer/program/etc always wants me to do something for it, but it never asks for those things at an opportune time. No, I don't want to update my computer right now, and no, updating overnight tonight isn't good either because I need to keep this program running until tomorrow. I understand that your new UX is better for me, and I'm sure I'll love it, but forcing that on me right now is preventing me from doing what I need to do. I see your error dialog describing some odd issue, but I don't have time to triage that right now and decide to take the time to fix it. I wish software would respect the human element more. My time and attention is valuable, please don't interrupt it carelessly.

leephillips 5y ago
I guess the software I use respects the human element more, because it never does these things to me. Why not choose better software?
- hulitu 5y ago
  Because there is no better SW. See Windows 10 or Android for examples.
  - fsflover 5y ago
    Just use GNU/Linux (on mobile, too!).
    - infinitezest 5y ago
      Are there any GNU/Linux distros for mobile that are actually worth using? I'm not aware of any but I'd love to be proven wrong.
      - hparadiz 5y ago
        My SO switched from Gentoo to Fedora and loves it.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - marrs 5y ago
        I think some are getting quite good. I’m following Manjaro/Phosh, and it’s showing promise. I’m not using it for much yet, just watching it develop. I believe other distros are further along.
      - kaba0 5y ago
        The closest thing to secure, actually usable Linux distro on phones is Android; if you are serious about security and degoogling GrapheneOS especially. The bad thing is that you have to have a Pixel for that. Source: I own a Pinephone and has tried both Phosh-based and KDE-based offerings, there is also Sailfish though. Out of these Sailfish is the only one close to usable as of now.
        pjmlp 5y ago
        Except in what concerns Google, the Linux kernel is an implementation detail considered no go area for app developers to call into. Ignoring this advice might lead to application termination.
      - 29083011397778 5y ago
        As it stands, the only thing keeping my Pinephone from replacing my BlackBerry is better messaging notifications. Calling, messaging (via Matrix), and Firefox are all mostly good enough for me. Note I'm not saying it's good, but good enough for me. I've been using Arch, as I find the rate of improvement shows in a rolling release distro, and in my experience, Mobian is no more stable.
      - mariusor 5y ago
        Yes: Sailfish OS.
  - tomrod 5y ago
    Fedora and Ubuntu seem to work great.
  - jayd16 5y ago
    Android apps update in the background. Most don't nag you unless there's some breaking change.
  - Jorengarenar 5y ago
    Almost any Linux distro respects its user more than W10. And since Android is also a Linux distro, then there are alternative forks based on it too (e.g. LineageOS).
    - baud147258 5y ago
      > Almost any Linux distro respects its user more than W10. It's not that hard to respect users more than W10
  - alpaca128 5y ago
    > Because there is no better SW. See Windows 10 Windows 10 isn't even the best Windows, let alone the best software in its field.
- oblib 5y ago
  Same here. I don't install much new software anymore and I have removed software that does that.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    I can uninstall Microsoft Office from my work Mac but Intune will put it right back because it knows I simply need it to open work documents :) We don't always have a choice.
- yunohn 5y ago
  Do you have some good examples of such software, to share?
  - leephillips 5y ago
    I think that random examples without reference to a particular arena would be...random. If you would like a recommendation for an email client, or a web server, or a programming language, I would be happy to share what works for me. I do everything on Linux, by the way.
  - fsflover 5y ago
    https://prism-break.org https://prism-break.org
- KeepFlying 5y ago
  Better software doesn't always exist and when it does exist is not always possible to switch (or has other downsides). But for example Steam updates on boot, which is a (albeit minor) pain when I want to use it. Similar with Spotify. There aren't really any great alternatives to either of them that have equivalent libraries of content. Or going right to the core, Windows and it's annoyingly frequent updates. Sure I could use Linux (and I do on a few machines), but that isn't possible on my work machines, and introduces incompatibilities on my personal machines.
- fy20 5y ago
  Unfortunately that's not always feasible. I use Cura a 3D printing slicer (takes a 3D model, generates instructions for your printer), and it's one of the best at what it does (slicing). The UX is horrible though and is clearly 'designed by programmers' with little thought into how people will actually use it. And every time I upgrade there's a 50/50 chance it'll forget all my settings (there's lots of things you need to tweak and customise specific to your printer) and I'll need to start from scratch. Dealing with these issues is easier that switching to different software and learning it from scratch.
  - verinus 5y ago
    yea- deployment of CURA really has several weak points- we did not even got it to work with chocolatey correctly :(
- Tagbert 5y ago
  I’m really confused how the author generated 88 documents in Preview that are unsaved. What kind of documents and changes were these? Why were they not saved when the changes were made? Preview is mainly used to view image files and do simple editing. Those edits are auto saved as you go long. I’m sure the author has a point but I’m just distracted by this strange use case.
blowski 5y ago
It’s a balance though isn’t it. If they hide everything away so as to respect your time, then another user will be frustrated by the constant magic going on in the background. Even you might want more prompts in some situations. Maybe some applications could have an alert mode, similar to logging levels. But then it will probably get more buggy. Honestly, I rarely get annoyed by the number of popups in most of my software. I’ll happily take a few extra dialog boxes for extra control.
- the_af 5y ago
  I think this is it. The extreme alternative to "device, please don't ask me when you want to update something, just do it" is losing control of your computer. If you're comfortable, like the author mentions, having your digital "home" be away from your devices, to "live in the cloud", I guess this doesn't matter (at least, while your favorite cloud providers and services don't shut down taking all your data with them, decide to hike prices, or ban you for breaking some ToS rule). If you want to fully own your computer, it matters. You don't want to give away all control over it.
  - MereInterest 5y ago
    I don't think those are the only options. For example, Linux Mint shows an icon in the system tray to indicate when repository updates are available. I fully own the computer, and it is my choice if/when to apply updates. However, that doesn't imply that each individual program needs to yell at me at startup to get updates.
    - the_af 5y ago
      Yes, that's why I mentioned it as the extreme alternative. An option more in the middle is a gentle, non urgent, non nagging reminder. But what about security updates, though?
      - KeepFlying 5y ago
        For security updates it still depends on risk though. A flaw in my browser is extremely high risk and I require it fixed and updated quickly. But a flaw in my SSH server that is only accessible from behind a VPN is lower. And the risk is lower still if it's a flaw in a feature which I do not use. I don't see an easy solution of course, it's a hard problem. But I wish that I had more granular control over what and when I update, and was given a clearer way to see the impacts of the update so I could weigh risk.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
wvenable 5y ago
Personally I almost never agree with these "the desktop is dead" kind of articles. If anything, the problem this author has to be exacerbated by the move away from the traditional desktop style than an embrace of it. That preview close dialog is not something you'd see 20 years but is something you see in "apps" all the time. Perhaps the problem is, as you allude to, that software is hostile to the user now. There's always something more than simply being a tool that you buy, use, and close. Now most programs are merely portals for "services".
- asymptosis 5y ago
  This is spot on. People want to hand over responsibility for their computations to some big company offering a "free" service so long as you use the official app, and then they wonder why they don't feel like they have any power or freedom.
- imglorp 5y ago
  > Now most programs are merely portals for "services". More like three legs on that stool. The sale price, the services upsell, and then they leverate insights gained from capturing telemetry about you. Eg Windows is all three.
- masklinn 5y ago
  > That preview close dialog is not something you'd see 20 years That’s because the application would straight up lose the files without prompting. Also pretty sure text editors had something similar 50 years back, that’s why you :q! from vim, :q would tell you that you have unsaved buffers (or whatever the lingo is) and refuse. TFA is literally abusing a crash-resistance feature out of laziness, and will no doubt complain when it fails them. 20 years back we’d all trained ourselves to save with regularity to avoid issues, that feature would be considered manna from the heavens, and tfa absolutely mental. Completely stupidly too, I must add: > This is the dialog that I see every time I want to close the Preview app to clear my desktop of all that clutter in a hurry for a video call. MacOS has a shortcut to minimize all windows! It even has a shortcut to hide all aplications but the current one! You don’t need to close anything to “clear your desktop in a hurry”!
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
The (graphical) software program with guaranteed internet connectivity has become a control vector for the software author, many times the company employing the software author, over the user. Users are being "used", as suggested by the original author of GCC. For whatever reasons, non-graphical software seems to suffer less from this problem.
- OkayPhysicist 5y ago
  Non-graphical software is almost exclusively used by people who are extremely tech literate. Forfeiting control of a system doesn't really bite as hard when you didn't understand the system enough to control it much anyway.
  - marrs 5y ago
    It used to be used by people who were moderately to hardly tech literate. Not sure if that’s relevant but it feels like it should be
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
modzu 5y ago
this x1000! ^ this guy gets it. its the main reason i switched to linux full time. microsoft are you listening?
Causality1 5y ago
Seconded. It seems like over the years I spend a greater and greater fraction of my screen time either setting something up or un-fucking it after an update/new version ruined it.
mrighele 5y ago
> No, I don't want to update my computer right now, and no, updating overnight tonight isn't good either because I need to keep this program running until tomorrow. I understand that your new UX is better for me, and I'm sure I'll love it, but forcing that on me right now is preventing me from doing what I need to do. I especially love when Firefox decides that he really needs to update, and I cannot open any new tab until I do so. Who cares if I am on a crappy connection and the download that I need to finish will take 20 minutes more; it's either restart it or wait until I finish. And that other thing in that tab that I need time to finish but I cannot really save ? Who cares.
- ripdog 5y ago
  That Firefox issue only happens on Linux when you upgrade Firefox on disk using your package manager while Firefox is running. The ABI mismatch between the running version and the new version makes starting new Firefox processes unstable, so it's disabled to avoid crashes. Simply don't run system updates during a Firefox session and you're golden.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    Yeah, it’s a linux distro issue. Alternatively, run NixOS that instead of swapping the running executable file under itself will create a new environment with a new firefox and start that one next time.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
> When I open a program, I want to use that program. I don't want to update it, I don't want to see all the new features, I want to USE it. Indeed. Microsoft Office I'm looking at you! I don't think I've ever actually looked at one of those "Hey cool new stuff for you" popups more than trying to identify how to get rid of it as quickly as possible. And even worse is "Hey here's a new feature we like so we turned it on for you, good luck figuring out where to turn it off again lol"
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  Exactly. I mean, how hard is it to just give people a proper changelog? Am I the only one who's excited about the new features, when I get to read a proper list of them before installing a new version of the product?
- nathanasmith 5y ago
  Google Maps on Android is the worst offender I've ever seen with this. Practically every time I open the app I get spammed with some dialog box or extraneous UI elements. The worst part is Google Maps is kind of a "just in time" affair. I only open it when I'm going somewhere and I need it to function right now. Alas.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
chrisan 5y ago
It didn’t used to be like that. But then people never updated their os/software and we ended up with lots of vulnerabilities. I like where Windows is now, I get notified of required updates but I can defer it for a few days/week. For non-technical people who don’t know how to setup defers I’d imagine they would also be the crowd before who didn’t update. I’m totally fine with my parents occasionally grumbling about a forced reboot overnight. Likewise all the software I use, besides online games, let me defer updates. Lots of stuff also now has the update next start, which I also like. I don’t even notice my browser updating most of the time until I open dev tools and see “what’s new”
- goatlover 5y ago
  > But then people never updated their os/software and we ended up with lots of vulnerabilities. < Seems like we have a fundamental security issue that results in having to keep fixing vulnerabilities across most software, which sounds like applying bandaids and treating symptoms rather than coming up with a more secure approach.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  > But then people never updated their os/software and we ended up with lots of vulnerabilities. Perhaps the issue was that we insisted every program be internet connected. If everything were offline a la Battlestar Galactica, security exposure would be greatly reduced - pretty much only the standard USB stick attack vector would work.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
> When I open a program, I want to use that program. I don't want to update it, I don't want to see all the new features, I want to USE it. I opened it because I had a task to complete and all this junk is getting in my way. > And same when I close a program, as the author hits on very well. The weird thing is, that is a solved problem. App Store apps (Mac, iOS) will automatically update in the background and, unless the developers build it into the app, the changelog if any will be on the store page. All platforms have something similar. It's just that a lot of developers opt to release and update their thing separately for a variety of reasons. I agree on the OS updates though, some years ago there were a few... claims? Promises? Something that implied restarting to update would no longer be a thing. Dear reader, they were wrong. /me clicks the MacOS update thing away again
lanerobertlane 5y ago
> When I open a program, I want to use that program. I don't want to update it, I don't want to see all the new features, I want to USE it. I opened it because I had a task to complete and all this junk is getting in my way. Jonathan Blow did a talk similar to this a few years ago, about how "software is terrible". In a part of it, he double clicked on a .psd file to open in Photoshop and timed how long it took to open the image. It took around 8 seconds for Photoshop to display that image on screen. But the first thing the app did was show a splash screen image, almost instantly. His argument was, "Why, when I double click this image file that I want to view, does it instantly load an image which isn't the one I want to view, and then take 8 seconds to load the one I do want to view. If it can instantly load an image when I double click the file, why isn't that image the one I double clicked?"
- tobr 5y ago
  I’ve seen that talk too, and it struck me as a bad example. Photoshop is not primarily a tool for viewing images, but for editing them. It would be great if it could get me there faster, but as a comparison I just tried timing how long it takes to launch The Witness, and ended up with something like 13 seconds.
- c-cube 5y ago
  If it takes 8s to load the file, the better design is to take 8.05s instead to display the splash screen and a progress bar to indicate to the user that their request is being processed. Good interfaces are never unresponsive. So, bad example. :)
  - laurent92 5y ago
    In a parallel world, the image loads first, alone on the screen, then the toolboxes, then the window frame. Then the splash screen for 8s because the marketing guys always have it ;)
luxuryballs 5y ago
Yeah and Windows 10 designers take note: there’s no situation where it’s OK to randomly decide you’re going to log me off in 5 minutes without a freaking cancel button. I lost 20+ hours of work on a process that can’t resume itself because of this insanity.

leephillips 5y ago

I guess the software I use respects the human element more, because it never does these things to me. Why not choose better software?

hulitu 5y ago
Because there is no better SW. See Windows 10 or Android for examples.
- fsflover 5y ago
  Just use GNU/Linux (on mobile, too!).
  - infinitezest 5y ago
    Are there any GNU/Linux distros for mobile that are actually worth using? I'm not aware of any but I'd love to be proven wrong.
    - hparadiz 5y ago
      My SO switched from Gentoo to Fedora and loves it.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - marrs 5y ago
      I think some are getting quite good. I’m following Manjaro/Phosh, and it’s showing promise. I’m not using it for much yet, just watching it develop. I believe other distros are further along.
    - kaba0 5y ago
      The closest thing to secure, actually usable Linux distro on phones is Android; if you are serious about security and degoogling GrapheneOS especially. The bad thing is that you have to have a Pixel for that. Source: I own a Pinephone and has tried both Phosh-based and KDE-based offerings, there is also Sailfish though. Out of these Sailfish is the only one close to usable as of now.
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        Except in what concerns Google, the Linux kernel is an implementation detail considered no go area for app developers to call into. Ignoring this advice might lead to application termination.
    - 29083011397778 5y ago
      As it stands, the only thing keeping my Pinephone from replacing my BlackBerry is better messaging notifications. Calling, messaging (via Matrix), and Firefox are all mostly good enough for me. Note I'm not saying it's good, but good enough for me. I've been using Arch, as I find the rate of improvement shows in a rolling release distro, and in my experience, Mobian is no more stable.
    - mariusor 5y ago
      Yes: Sailfish OS.
- tomrod 5y ago
  Fedora and Ubuntu seem to work great.
- jayd16 5y ago
  Android apps update in the background. Most don't nag you unless there's some breaking change.
- Jorengarenar 5y ago
  Almost any Linux distro respects its user more than W10. And since Android is also a Linux distro, then there are alternative forks based on it too (e.g. LineageOS).
  - baud147258 5y ago
    > Almost any Linux distro respects its user more than W10. It's not that hard to respect users more than W10
- alpaca128 5y ago
  > Because there is no better SW. See Windows 10 Windows 10 isn't even the best Windows, let alone the best software in its field.
oblib 5y ago
Same here. I don't install much new software anymore and I have removed software that does that.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  I can uninstall Microsoft Office from my work Mac but Intune will put it right back because it knows I simply need it to open work documents :) We don't always have a choice.
yunohn 5y ago
Do you have some good examples of such software, to share?
- leephillips 5y ago
  I think that random examples without reference to a particular arena would be...random. If you would like a recommendation for an email client, or a web server, or a programming language, I would be happy to share what works for me. I do everything on Linux, by the way.
- fsflover 5y ago
  https://prism-break.org https://prism-break.org
KeepFlying 5y ago
Better software doesn't always exist and when it does exist is not always possible to switch (or has other downsides). But for example Steam updates on boot, which is a (albeit minor) pain when I want to use it. Similar with Spotify. There aren't really any great alternatives to either of them that have equivalent libraries of content. Or going right to the core, Windows and it's annoyingly frequent updates. Sure I could use Linux (and I do on a few machines), but that isn't possible on my work machines, and introduces incompatibilities on my personal machines.
fy20 5y ago
Unfortunately that's not always feasible. I use Cura a 3D printing slicer (takes a 3D model, generates instructions for your printer), and it's one of the best at what it does (slicing). The UX is horrible though and is clearly 'designed by programmers' with little thought into how people will actually use it. And every time I upgrade there's a 50/50 chance it'll forget all my settings (there's lots of things you need to tweak and customise specific to your printer) and I'll need to start from scratch. Dealing with these issues is easier that switching to different software and learning it from scratch.
- verinus 5y ago
  yea- deployment of CURA really has several weak points- we did not even got it to work with chocolatey correctly :(
Tagbert 5y ago
I’m really confused how the author generated 88 documents in Preview that are unsaved. What kind of documents and changes were these? Why were they not saved when the changes were made? Preview is mainly used to view image files and do simple editing. Those edits are auto saved as you go long. I’m sure the author has a point but I’m just distracted by this strange use case.

blowski 5y ago

It’s a balance though isn’t it. If they hide everything away so as to respect your time, then another user will be frustrated by the constant magic going on in the background. Even you might want more prompts in some situations. Maybe some applications could have an alert mode, similar to logging levels. But then it will probably get more buggy. Honestly, I rarely get annoyed by the number of popups in most of my software. I’ll happily take a few extra dialog boxes for extra control.

the_af 5y ago
I think this is it. The extreme alternative to "device, please don't ask me when you want to update something, just do it" is losing control of your computer. If you're comfortable, like the author mentions, having your digital "home" be away from your devices, to "live in the cloud", I guess this doesn't matter (at least, while your favorite cloud providers and services don't shut down taking all your data with them, decide to hike prices, or ban you for breaking some ToS rule). If you want to fully own your computer, it matters. You don't want to give away all control over it.
- MereInterest 5y ago
  I don't think those are the only options. For example, Linux Mint shows an icon in the system tray to indicate when repository updates are available. I fully own the computer, and it is my choice if/when to apply updates. However, that doesn't imply that each individual program needs to yell at me at startup to get updates.
  - the_af 5y ago
    Yes, that's why I mentioned it as the extreme alternative. An option more in the middle is a gentle, non urgent, non nagging reminder. But what about security updates, though?
    - KeepFlying 5y ago
      For security updates it still depends on risk though. A flaw in my browser is extremely high risk and I require it fixed and updated quickly. But a flaw in my SSH server that is only accessible from behind a VPN is lower. And the risk is lower still if it's a flaw in a feature which I do not use. I don't see an easy solution of course, it's a hard problem. But I wish that I had more granular control over what and when I update, and was given a clearer way to see the impacts of the update so I could weigh risk.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

wvenable 5y ago

Personally I almost never agree with these "the desktop is dead" kind of articles. If anything, the problem this author has to be exacerbated by the move away from the traditional desktop style than an embrace of it. That preview close dialog is not something you'd see 20 years but is something you see in "apps" all the time. Perhaps the problem is, as you allude to, that software is hostile to the user now. There's always something more than simply being a tool that you buy, use, and close. Now most programs are merely portals for "services".

asymptosis 5y ago
This is spot on. People want to hand over responsibility for their computations to some big company offering a "free" service so long as you use the official app, and then they wonder why they don't feel like they have any power or freedom.
imglorp 5y ago
> Now most programs are merely portals for "services". More like three legs on that stool. The sale price, the services upsell, and then they leverate insights gained from capturing telemetry about you. Eg Windows is all three.
masklinn 5y ago
> That preview close dialog is not something you'd see 20 years That’s because the application would straight up lose the files without prompting. Also pretty sure text editors had something similar 50 years back, that’s why you :q! from vim, :q would tell you that you have unsaved buffers (or whatever the lingo is) and refuse. TFA is literally abusing a crash-resistance feature out of laziness, and will no doubt complain when it fails them. 20 years back we’d all trained ourselves to save with regularity to avoid issues, that feature would be considered manna from the heavens, and tfa absolutely mental. Completely stupidly too, I must add: > This is the dialog that I see every time I want to close the Preview app to clear my desktop of all that clutter in a hurry for a video call. MacOS has a shortcut to minimize all windows! It even has a shortcut to hide all aplications but the current one! You don’t need to close anything to “clear your desktop in a hurry”!

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

The (graphical) software program with guaranteed internet connectivity has become a control vector for the software author, many times the company employing the software author, over the user. Users are being "used", as suggested by the original author of GCC. For whatever reasons, non-graphical software seems to suffer less from this problem.

OkayPhysicist 5y ago
Non-graphical software is almost exclusively used by people who are extremely tech literate. Forfeiting control of a system doesn't really bite as hard when you didn't understand the system enough to control it much anyway.
- marrs 5y ago
  It used to be used by people who were moderately to hardly tech literate. Not sure if that’s relevant but it feels like it should be
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

modzu 5y ago

this x1000! ^ this guy gets it. its the main reason i switched to linux full time. microsoft are you listening?

Causality1 5y ago

Seconded. It seems like over the years I spend a greater and greater fraction of my screen time either setting something up or un-fucking it after an update/new version ruined it.

mrighele 5y ago

> No, I don't want to update my computer right now, and no, updating overnight tonight isn't good either because I need to keep this program running until tomorrow. I understand that your new UX is better for me, and I'm sure I'll love it, but forcing that on me right now is preventing me from doing what I need to do. I especially love when Firefox decides that he really needs to update, and I cannot open any new tab until I do so. Who cares if I am on a crappy connection and the download that I need to finish will take 20 minutes more; it's either restart it or wait until I finish. And that other thing in that tab that I need time to finish but I cannot really save ? Who cares.

ripdog 5y ago
That Firefox issue only happens on Linux when you upgrade Firefox on disk using your package manager while Firefox is running. The ABI mismatch between the running version and the new version makes starting new Firefox processes unstable, so it's disabled to avoid crashes. Simply don't run system updates during a Firefox session and you're golden.
- kaba0 5y ago
  Yeah, it’s a linux distro issue. Alternatively, run NixOS that instead of swapping the running executable file under itself will create a new environment with a new firefox and start that one next time.

GekkePrutser 5y ago

> When I open a program, I want to use that program. I don't want to update it, I don't want to see all the new features, I want to USE it. Indeed. Microsoft Office I'm looking at you! I don't think I've ever actually looked at one of those "Hey cool new stuff for you" popups more than trying to identify how to get rid of it as quickly as possible. And even worse is "Hey here's a new feature we like so we turned it on for you, good luck figuring out where to turn it off again lol"

TeMPOraL 5y ago
Exactly. I mean, how hard is it to just give people a proper changelog? Am I the only one who's excited about the new features, when I get to read a proper list of them before installing a new version of the product?
nathanasmith 5y ago
Google Maps on Android is the worst offender I've ever seen with this. Practically every time I open the app I get spammed with some dialog box or extraneous UI elements. The worst part is Google Maps is kind of a "just in time" affair. I only open it when I'm going somewhere and I need it to function right now. Alas.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

chrisan 5y ago

It didn’t used to be like that. But then people never updated their os/software and we ended up with lots of vulnerabilities. I like where Windows is now, I get notified of required updates but I can defer it for a few days/week. For non-technical people who don’t know how to setup defers I’d imagine they would also be the crowd before who didn’t update. I’m totally fine with my parents occasionally grumbling about a forced reboot overnight. Likewise all the software I use, besides online games, let me defer updates. Lots of stuff also now has the update next start, which I also like. I don’t even notice my browser updating most of the time until I open dev tools and see “what’s new”

goatlover 5y ago
> But then people never updated their os/software and we ended up with lots of vulnerabilities. < Seems like we have a fundamental security issue that results in having to keep fixing vulnerabilities across most software, which sounds like applying bandaids and treating symptoms rather than coming up with a more secure approach.
selfhoster11 5y ago
> But then people never updated their os/software and we ended up with lots of vulnerabilities. Perhaps the issue was that we insisted every program be internet connected. If everything were offline a la Battlestar Galactica, security exposure would be greatly reduced - pretty much only the standard USB stick attack vector would work.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

> When I open a program, I want to use that program. I don't want to update it, I don't want to see all the new features, I want to USE it. I opened it because I had a task to complete and all this junk is getting in my way. > And same when I close a program, as the author hits on very well. The weird thing is, that is a solved problem. App Store apps (Mac, iOS) will automatically update in the background and, unless the developers build it into the app, the changelog if any will be on the store page. All platforms have something similar. It's just that a lot of developers opt to release and update their thing separately for a variety of reasons. I agree on the OS updates though, some years ago there were a few... claims? Promises? Something that implied restarting to update would no longer be a thing. Dear reader, they were wrong. /me clicks the MacOS update thing away again

lanerobertlane 5y ago

> When I open a program, I want to use that program. I don't want to update it, I don't want to see all the new features, I want to USE it. I opened it because I had a task to complete and all this junk is getting in my way. Jonathan Blow did a talk similar to this a few years ago, about how "software is terrible". In a part of it, he double clicked on a .psd file to open in Photoshop and timed how long it took to open the image. It took around 8 seconds for Photoshop to display that image on screen. But the first thing the app did was show a splash screen image, almost instantly. His argument was, "Why, when I double click this image file that I want to view, does it instantly load an image which isn't the one I want to view, and then take 8 seconds to load the one I do want to view. If it can instantly load an image when I double click the file, why isn't that image the one I double clicked?"

tobr 5y ago
I’ve seen that talk too, and it struck me as a bad example. Photoshop is not primarily a tool for viewing images, but for editing them. It would be great if it could get me there faster, but as a comparison I just tried timing how long it takes to launch The Witness, and ended up with something like 13 seconds.
c-cube 5y ago
If it takes 8s to load the file, the better design is to take 8.05s instead to display the splash screen and a progress bar to indicate to the user that their request is being processed. Good interfaces are never unresponsive. So, bad example. :)
- laurent92 5y ago
  In a parallel world, the image loads first, alone on the screen, then the toolboxes, then the window frame. Then the splash screen for 8s because the marketing guys always have it ;)

luxuryballs 5y ago

Yeah and Windows 10 designers take note: there’s no situation where it’s OK to randomly decide you’re going to log me off in 5 minutes without a freaking cancel button. I lost 20+ hours of work on a process that can’t resume itself because of this insanity.