I do like to think that the effort put into software development with each iteration is actually making software better: optimizing performance, fixing bugs, cl

I do like to think that the effort put into software development with each iteration is actually making software better: optimizing performance, fixing bugs, closing security vulnerabilities, etc. So I've been happy with Arch-based distros and most Windows updates, at least. When I take the long-term view, I'm amazed by the improvements in software since I started using a computer in the 1990s. Many more things "just work" now (e.g. Linux on a laptop). Home computer operating systems and applications can run for years now without breaking, whereas reinstalling everything (e.g. the cesspool of Windows 95/98/XP) was almost a monthly requirement back in the day. An operating system that used to take 5-10 minutes to fully boot now takes only seconds on a typical machine. I know that this isn't always true. Sometimes it's just feature bloat, or a design change for the sake of design change, which introduces more bugs and vulnerabilities. Maybe what I really want is the newest version of the software that I already have, as opposed to the newest software. At work we still use Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 on some mission-critical systems. So that's version 2.6.32 of the Linux kernel with equally old applications, and I'm not sure what we get for updates from the vendor in 2021. The problem is that there are recurring bugs and serious vulnerabilities in that system which will never get fixed at this point. You could argue that we know what the bugs are, at least.