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Ask HN: Any legal way against forced software upgrades and feature removal

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Re: Ask HN: Any legal way against forced software upgrades and feature removal

#51

Post by Etheryte »

paxys wrote: post #46
Etheryte wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can easily trust my older relatives to do fine on macOS, Linux would be either painful or more realistically a no go.

Older relatives aren't the ones complaining about auto updates and having full control of their hardware/software. iOS, macOS, Windows and the rest are in fact built with them in mind. This conversation is naturally about more technically inclined users.

I wouldn't really say so, updates break and change things for them all the same as they do for you and me, and just like us, they're unhappy about it. You simply won't usually hear their voices loudly on platforms like HN and the like.

Re: Ask HN: Any legal way against forced software upgrades and feature removal

#52

Post by [deleted] »

LoganDark wrote: post #31
albert180 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've needed 0 Seconds of hacking since using Fedora for 2 years. Linux has evolved in the last 14 Years

Oh yeah? I tried Silverblue a couple years ago, and the Nvidia driver stopped working after a motherboard swap. I tried Kinoite but KDE Plasma's subpixel antialiasing looks terrible on HiDPI displays. Maybe that's some of the "convenience and polish" that you just have to sacrifice in order to use FOSS, but I could also just use software that's properly polished and not care whether it is FOSS or not. And no, I'm not…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Any legal way against forced software upgrades and feature removal

#53

Post by olliej »

Automatic updates are a system setting that you can just turn off.

I’m not sure how you hit this path if you don’t have it turned on.

That said on a dialog like this anything other than an affirmative confirmation should be considered to not be a confirmation, and that specific failure seems like a general bug rather than anything nefarious. There are plenty of times users may want to delay an update even if they have auto updates enabled, and if one of the obvious ways to do that doesn’t I’m sure it would be annoying for them as well.

Re: Ask HN: Any legal way against forced software upgrades and feature removal

#54

Post by olliej »

rmorey wrote: post #19

> I clicked the “X” dismiss button. But Apple somehow assumed that that meant “yes, install it immediately” because 20 minutes later I got a “you must restart” notification and when I restarted, the system was running macOS 14.2.1. That definitely sounds like a bug to me, not a product decision. Real shitty though. Apple definitely better than Microsoft when it comes to shoving updates down your throat, but as others…

That’s my assumption - I imagine there’s general “prepare the update” path that gets canceled explicitly by clicking a “no” button and can easily imagine that kind of logic missing close the window or whatever.

Re: Ask HN: Any legal way against forced software upgrades and feature removal

#55

Post by kramerger »

Etheryte wrote: post #38
albert180 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've needed 0 Seconds of hacking since using Fedora for 2 years. Linux has evolved in the last 14 Years

I can easily trust my older relatives to do fine on macOS, Linux would be either painful or more realistically a no go.

On the contrary, I let older relatives use Linux so I don't need to support macos and windows constantly breaking.

In 5 years I've had 2 family support calls: one to setup a new WiFi on a Chromebook and one for turning the Chromebook on and off.

Re: Ask HN: Any legal way against forced software upgrades and feature removal

#56

Post by LoganDark »

Isognoviastoma wrote: post #49
LoganDark wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yeah? I tried Silverblue a couple years ago, and the Nvidia driver stopped working after a motherboard swap. I tried Kinoite but KDE Plasma's subpixel antialiasing looks terrible on HiDPI displays. Maybe that's some of the "convenience and polish" that you just have to sacrifice in order to use FOSS, but I could also just use software that's properly polished and not care whether it is FOSS or not. And no, I'm not…

Was nvidia driver foss or proprietary?

I think Silverblue comes preconfigured with the proprietary one, but I don't know how to check and also don't think it's possible to change it, since it's an immutable system.

It worked fine until that happened and basically made it unusable since I don't have an iGPU.

Maybe I'll try some other Fedora, or just go back to X11 on Arch, which worked well enough.

Re: Ask HN: Any legal way against forced software upgrades and feature removal

#57

Post by DyslexicAtheist »

donmcronald wrote: post #6

I wish there were legal protections against this kind of thing. Even worse, I’ve had updates break stuff that might never get fixed. For example, I have Roku TVs and a recent update broke CEC. The updates aren’t for my benefit, because my TVs worked fine from day one. Instead, the updates are to push more and more advertising and recommendations. It’s to the point where my TVs are slow, bloated, half broken trash. Th…

if you're a vendor and wish to sell IoT enabled consumer devices in EU 2025 then the Radio Equipment directive and the CRA force you to keep these _things_ updated in the name of security.

And there is nothing that forces you (the vendor) to keep security upgrades separate from features. So in practice you can force upgrades that then cripple features (for monetization) and in the name of cybersec.

:/

Re: Ask HN: Any legal way against forced software upgrades and feature removal

#60

Post by bb88 »

duffyjp wrote: post #41
bb88 wrote: post #14

This is the so called "enshittification" that's happening market wide. Vendor lock in sucks -- regardless whether it's Amazon, AWS, Apple or 1Password. The only real solution is to take your money and go elsewhere. Stop buying Apple products, say. Hell, I've even experienced vendor lock-in on FOSS products when the program crippled something I needed to use, or refused to fix an issue that caused me hours of tedious…

There's definitely a trend of FOSS products and older trivially priced products being bought up by companies that re-release in subscription models. So frustrating. I always get recommendations on the Play Store for World of Goo, an amazing game from 2008 that you can now only play if you're a Netflix subscriber. The 1.7 star rating has convinced no suits that that might not be what people what. On iPhone I used to u…

This sucks. I honestly think that software should have a 25 year copyright at most, and the source code should be released after copyright expires.

So windows 95 source code would have been released in 2020.

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