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Never update anything

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Re: Never update anything

#131

Post by forgotmypw17 »

jart wrote: post #117
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loved and lived Windows for a decade and felt so cozy and at home in it, but when the first force-upgrade happened, I knew it was time to move along. Just cannot accept things changing without my consent on my workstation.

Mac and Linux do the same thing. I know people who still prefer the OSX 10.3 and the GNOME2 GUIs, or for instance the way nytimes.com looked back in 2010. That's the problem with making GUIs the thing you love. Some goons stop by your home every few years and toss up the furniture. Apple is the gold standard since it pretty much looks the same as it did in the 80's and each major version tunes subtle things. Microsof…

Mac does it, which is why I also quit mac.

Some GNU/Linux distributions do it, but not all of them. And I have way more control over it when it does happen.

Apple was pretty solid until around Mountain Lion. Once I saw them messing with "Save As", I jumped.

I've had good experiences with LXDE and Xfce so far on multiple distros.

Anything Gnome are no longer in the running, however.

Re: Never update anything

#132

Post by Igelau »

web007 wrote: post #107

Corollary: Do hard things more often, per Martin Fowler - https://martinfowler.com/bliki/FrequencyReducesDifficulty.ht... Upgrade everything all the time and it will never be hard. You'll have full context for breaking changes, and the diff from A to B is always smaller than from A to Q, and less likely to break in strange and confusing ways.

I'm in this camp. I ran into a recent situation where I could have used a drop-in security module if the project had updated the framework in the past decade. Instead we rolled our own, which is janky and took longer than it should have.

Debts have a way of compounding. Tech debt is no exception. Tech debt begets tech debt begets tech debt, and it will hang on your velocity like a ball and chain.

Re: Never update anything

#133

Post by ericbarrett »

Taywee wrote: post #57
michaelt wrote: post #27

I've got some sympathy for this perspective. It's frustrating when you update in order to get the latest security updates - and you get forced to do a bunch of pointless busywork because some asshole has made some arbitrary change like deciding that 'which' is deprecated now.

> arbitrary change like deciding that 'which' is deprecated now. I kind of hate that this is going to live on as some example when the actual event was somebody proposing it, it failing in some builds on testing, and then a vote deciding against it. It was an example of good project governing preventing breakage, but for some reason it's already being remembered as the opposite.

I'm still bitter about ifconfig.

Re: Never update anything

#134

Post by Igelau »

AzzieElbab wrote: post #34

Never updating and always updating are just two different ways of sticking your head in the sand

It's more like sticking your head in a river.

No updates: ignorance is bliss. Until you need to breathe -- then you die.

All updates: maybe I can just drink the whole thing...

Re: Never update anything

#135

Post by forgotmypw17 »

jart wrote: post #129
saghm wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mac and Linux do the same thing The earlier responses in the thread were talking about forced upgrades. I'm not sure about MacOS since I don't use it much, but most Linux distros do not forcibly apply upgrades like Windows does; you can continue to use old packages and even reboot the machine indefinitely. Sure, you might not get security fixes or keep unrelated packages up to date beyond a certain point, but that'…

Force is a strong word, since Windows provides ways to opt-out of feature upgrades. It's also probably possible to opt-out of bug fixes too. If you want to put a rosy spin on things, you could think of it as a free system administration service. There's a lot of people out there who are working really hard, for you, to make sure it goes smoothly. It's also common for Linux distros to use the opt-out model these days…

> Force is a strong word, since Windows provides ways to opt-out of feature upgrades.

I dunno, I've heard multiple reports of people leaving their machine alone and coming back to it having upgraded and rebooted into a new version, sometimes into an unrecoverable blue screen.

How would they have opted out of that?

Re: Never update anything

#136

Post by forgotmypw17 »

yuliyp wrote: post #63
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #32

I literally never update anything unless it is not working. Quite happy here with Firefox 66.x on Ubuntu LXDE 14.x, which is what happened to come with this particular device. I have an iPad running iOS 8.x, which I'm also happy with, especially when I do testing on the clusterfucks that are later iOS and Firefox releases. Browsing a handful of reputable text-based websites from behind a NAT, I don't see the problem.…

This works at small scale (read: a small startup or for your own machine). It begins to fall apart once you have dozens of services each deployed at some time in the past 5 years, and no clue whether any of them are safe to update, or even validate.

Yeah, anything at scale I build with a bare minimum toolkit, and only use conservative tools in the process.

By conservative, I mean something which would still work today if I wrote a script for it 10 or 20 years go.

Re: Never update anything

#137

Post by jart »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #131
jart wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mac and Linux do the same thing. I know people who still prefer the OSX 10.3 and the GNOME2 GUIs, or for instance the way nytimes.com looked back in 2010. That's the problem with making GUIs the thing you love. Some goons stop by your home every few years and toss up the furniture. Apple is the gold standard since it pretty much looks the same as it did in the 80's and each major version tunes subtle things. Microsof…

Mac does it, which is why I also quit mac. Some GNU/Linux distributions do it, but not all of them. And I have way more control over it when it does happen. Apple was pretty solid until around Mountain Lion. Once I saw them messing with "Save As", I jumped. I've had good experiences with LXDE and Xfce so far on multiple distros. Anything Gnome are no longer in the running, however.

Looking at Google Trends for GNOME,KDE,LXDE,XFCE from 2004 to present is interesting. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%... Back then GNOME and KDE stood head and shoulders over all alternatives, whereas these last twelve months, all the Linux desktop choices appear more or less in the same league. Open source sort of behaves the opposite way as markets where instead of shakeout we get shakein.

Re: Never update anything

#138

Post by eutropia »

travisd wrote: post #33
benburton wrote: post #17

> Docker Desktop doesn't let you decide whether you want updates or not, unless you pay them This made me uninstall Docker Desktop.

They actually just reverted this change within the last week (of course with accompanying “we love listening to your feedback!!!1!” eyeroll inducing messaging).

The auto update “feature” was only ever required so they could get everyone on to a version that they could remotely shut down to force subscription revenue. Makes perfect sense that it was a paid “pro” feature before to not be forced: you were already doing what they wanted. Now everyone is on 4.0 and they can turn it off again.

Re: Never update anything

#139

Post by merrywhether »

Waterluvian wrote: post #73
mikeklaas wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

whoa, do you have a link?

https://imgur.com/dCxh2Dd (sorry. Looks terrible on phones) https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=8499 So obviously I was embellishing the language, but the sentiment remains the same. I found this because I checked the RDS admin panel, which I rarely do. I didn't get an email. It was very alarming to discover and makes me anxious about what other forced upgrades I'll miss. I appreciate the point of this, but…

At some point the alternatives are force-updating your DB or shutting it down. One of those at least has a chance of keeping your service online. I agree the lack of communication is pretty bad though.

Re: Never update anything

#140

Post by kouteiheika »

jart wrote: post #117
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loved and lived Windows for a decade and felt so cozy and at home in it, but when the first force-upgrade happened, I knew it was time to move along. Just cannot accept things changing without my consent on my workstation.

Mac and Linux do the same thing. I know people who still prefer the OSX 10.3 and the GNOME2 GUIs, or for instance the way nytimes.com looked back in 2010. That's the problem with making GUIs the thing you love. Some goons stop by your home every few years and toss up the furniture. Apple is the gold standard since it pretty much looks the same as it did in the 80's and each major version tunes subtle things. Microsof…

> Linux do the same thing. [..] Then there's Linux where each GUI update is a radical break with tradition that continually reinvents its own identity.

If you're using a "mainstream" desktop environment (e.g. GNOME), then yeah, but that's not universally true. I've been using exactly the same desktop environment for something like ~12 years; I love Linux because if you set it up right it's essentially zero maintenance (significantly less than Windows and macOS), and almost nothing changes without your consent. The only forced change during those 12 years that I've noticed was the migration to systemd, and Firefox reskinning their GUI for no good reason every other release.

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