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> It's not unusual for my laptop to have hundreds of days of uptime. This isn’t something to be proud of. It means that you’re not applying the regularly-relea

> It's not unusual for my laptop to have hundreds of days of uptime. This isn’t something to be proud of. It means that you’re not applying the regularly-released security updates. macOS is spectacularly good at restoring state on reboot. It’s like it never happened. Update your software.

deleted 2y ago
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minkles 2y ago
It depends what your risk profile is. There are no absolutes. Numerous minor updates have screwed up things for me, particularly with some applications I rely on. I will usually lag 2-3 patches behind and wait for other people to suffer first and confirm what I use is stable. I am still on Sonoma / 14.5 at the moment. Incidentally I actually have a Mac Pro here which is running Monterey which hasn't been patched for about 9 months. The universe has not and will not be imploding any time soon. Everyone forgets the "availability" bit of security.
hakanderyal 2y ago
That's a good idea. I'm not keeping it as long nowadays.
jeffparsons 2y ago
> Update your software. I don't disagree, but also... I find it a bit surprising that this is still a thing. Why is there ever a time when I _must_ reboot? Is it just that mainstream kernels were designed at a time when people had lower expectations around this sort of thing, and now it's too hard to evolve their designs toward something that would allow for zero-downtime patching in ~all cases? Other examples that make me wonder if it's mostly because people haven't demanded better: - Enormous updates for all kinds of things (gigabytes for a bug fix release) because differential updates aren't pervasive. - Windows updates where a huge amount of work is done during the "rebooting" phase (why can't most of this be done before reboot?) - Absolutely atrocious power management on pretty much anything that's not a MacBook, and even not perfect on those. I never thought we'd have flying cars by now, but if you asked me a decade ago to predict the future of operating systems... it wouldn't be this.

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minkles 2y ago

It depends what your risk profile is. There are no absolutes. Numerous minor updates have screwed up things for me, particularly with some applications I rely on. I will usually lag 2-3 patches behind and wait for other people to suffer first and confirm what I use is stable. I am still on Sonoma / 14.5 at the moment. Incidentally I actually have a Mac Pro here which is running Monterey which hasn't been patched for about 9 months. The universe has not and will not be imploding any time soon. Everyone forgets the "availability" bit of security.

hakanderyal 2y ago

That's a good idea. I'm not keeping it as long nowadays.

jeffparsons 2y ago

> Update your software. I don't disagree, but also... I find it a bit surprising that this is still a thing. Why is there ever a time when I _must_ reboot? Is it just that mainstream kernels were designed at a time when people had lower expectations around this sort of thing, and now it's too hard to evolve their designs toward something that would allow for zero-downtime patching in ~all cases? Other examples that make me wonder if it's mostly because people haven't demanded better: - Enormous updates for all kinds of things (gigabytes for a bug fix release) because differential updates aren't pervasive. - Windows updates where a huge amount of work is done during the "rebooting" phase (why can't most of this be done before reboot?) - Absolutely atrocious power management on pretty much anything that's not a MacBook, and even not perfect on those. I never thought we'd have flying cars by now, but if you asked me a decade ago to predict the future of operating systems... it wouldn't be this.