Ask HN: Why have OS updates become so aggressive?
After the controversy surround the aggressiveness of Windows 10 updates, I was a little relieved to be a mac user.
However, this morning I was confronted with a notification to Update macOS to Sierra, the two options are "Install" and "Details". In addition an app icon has been added to the launch pad to install Sierra.
Is this the new norm? Why such a strong push requiring users to update?
41 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 70.8 ms ] threadBecause the "move fast and break things" of app development has hit the mainstream and crossed over into the OS.
It allows for faster iteration at the expense of some stability and familiarity.
Think about it this way. Chrome's major innovation was being the first browser to rapidly update itself. That allowed it to quickly leapfrog over IE and Mozilla since they could push out many more changes over the same period of time AND those changes would be more likely to be stable. It also eliminated the need to support old versions like IE 6 with security fixes
To my parents, opening a spreadsheet or listening to music is the same. They lack the lexicon to discover newer interface trends like the hamburger icon, or ribbon interface.
Many people used IE6 because there was a huge investment in it. I agree it was terrible to support and write against, but I don't see any problem with using a payroll system that was written 10 years ago and dependant on IE6 if your needs haven't changed. It seems silly to constantly update or completely rewrite something that's working just fine if needs haven't changed. It just sucks that they would use the same browser for payroll as they do for browsing the Internet.
This is exactly the sort of thing most users don't want.
It's designed to make not updating as difficult as updating so neglectful users don't default to not updating.
It is an unfortunate reality that we live a world where people are actively pursuing ways to infect and control our personal computers. The software (OS makers in particular) are doing their best to react/respond to the threats as they are discovered and identified.
It is continual game of cat & mouse
This is like trying to teach someone to take extreme safety precautions around the magic glowing green rock that you insist will make them get sick and die thirty years later if they don't follow some exacting procedure that involves wearing a suit with a mask that actively hurts to wear: one with sharp edges which cuts their face and has even on multiple times left them with a scar.
Sure: maybe you can try to spend a bunch of time teaching this person about radiation, but there are billions of them and they don't care. You can force them to wear the suit and make their lives painful and shitty. Or maybe you can admit to yourself that "maybe I am part of the problem" and make the suit not actively hurt to wear. You can't get rid of the suit, but we can at least decrease the attrition as much as possible.
As far as I am concerned, Apple (and I am not neccessarily saying they are unique: only that I only can explicity state at them as I have been so centrally in their ecosystem for the past decade) actively scorns their "uneducated" users, refusing to accept any blame for the people who don't upgrade, and this is whether you are examining at their actual engineering practices, consuming their marketing messages ("be courageous"), or you talk to them in person (my favorite so far being someone who told me they are proud to work there as Apple is willing to tell our users that they are just afraid of the future and will need to adjust).
And again: even looking past this problem (that you really can't "counter" experience with non-experience), providing "stable" upgrades as the default that do not push people to do major upgrades with totally-unrelated massive user interface changes or gratuitously incompatible architecture breakages. Does this take time and thought? Yes. But if you aren't doing this, you--not the user!--are directly responsible for any loss of life or property that results from users not upgrading.
(FWIW, this is actually related in an interesting way to how people in my country, America, do not trust scientists. Rather than attempting to increase trust in science among the general population, which is the reason why countries that have high vaccination rates are where they are, people would prefer to blame the uneducated masses--end users who are constantly being jerked around by popular science reporting who are probably just sick of being told about stuff that never happens or being told to do first one thing and then the opposite next year--and legislate them into forced compliance :/.)
When did it become the new normal for OS's to break compatibility with older hardware? Or was all this hardware relying on undocumented and non-standardized interfaces?
I have no idea if the examples I've seen ware relying on undocumented APIs and as a user it's irrelevant (there aren't too many choices in high end audio hardware and you can't always mix and match vendors). I've seen a new OS comes out, it no longer works with the hardware you have (or it introduced bugs), and nobody issues an update to fix it on either side. You're running a business, so you may or may not care about the new features, but what was working yesterday absolutely has to work today.
There's an article on the front page right now talking about how macOS broke the "poll" call. Nobody can say with confidence if it'll even get fixed. libcurl is working around it, but not everyone has the bandwidth to deal with it.
My 12-year experience of ~250 Windows-based, mostly home/small business customers, is that they do, almost universally. The Vista/Win7 method of install automatically, ask to reboot just works. I have very, very rarely come across a computer that hasn't had updates installed, or had it's reboot.
This does depend on how savvy a user is. If they're on Win, they can just download the Sysinternals suite and poke around looking for rootkits or obvious attempts of gaining persistence. Autoruns is an invaluable tool for this and I have caught a few nasty rootkits with that. But you are right, a concerning number of people leave the defaults switched on and don't attempt to harden Windows. The first thing I do is uninstall Powershell and lower the attack surface because I don't want another d00d at Blackhat showcasing how he/she used Powershell to gain persistence on a machine for months at a time, sometimes years.
Why not make the world a better place, push the updates hard, and just jump to the shit talking? ;)
But that is not a valid excuse to force major version upgrade like win8 => win10. It has little to do with security and it forces a different environment onto the user.
It does when you start to talk about unsupported versions.
If you wanna talk about unsupported stuff, talk about the printer drivers that do not exist on the new OS version.
South Park Studios still uses an image compositor called Shake. It's cross platform (OSX, Windows, Linux) and Apple stopped development in 2008, but they still use Shake to make new episodes. There's a good chance it won't run on the latest version of the operating system, but they've made a huge investment in software and hardware that works fine. Forcing and update would shut down production.
Why? These companies do put in work to try and maintain compatibility.
> they've made a huge investment in software and hardware that works fine
Sure. and that bridge over there will work fine for forever too, so lets ignore any maintenance or safety upgrades. IT Infrastructure is still infrastructure. Admittedly when you are talking about a TV show it's not exactly critical.
+ it's still possible to deactivate the updates but you have to dig a little deeper to do it.
I might have been doing a project and lost half a day of my work just as well.
Now I have to go and take all permisions away from Reboot service in Windows 10
Also it keeps adding fucking Edge and Store to my quickbar every single update
Is Microsoft retarded? How can this be a good idea
Every time I said 'no' to reboot, it never rebooted.
It only re-added Edge/Store to the taskbar after major updates (that is, the first one and the anniversary update). It never did that on Patch Tuesday for random updates.
I wonder what's different between your and my computer.
Are you using Home, Pro, Enterprise or Education edition? I'm on Pro here.
I had connected to the Internet, came back to my desk to see a countdown dialog, rushed to click "Cancel." About 10 minutes later the computer was forcibly shut down to install updates. I figured, "might as well get all these updates out of the way." So after that round of updates installed it said it needed to restart in order to install updates. After that I checked for updates and it needed to restart a third time. I hadn't used Windows since XP and forgot how many times you need to reboot and how often updates get released (I'm used to Linux and MacOS). The aggressiveness is also very annoying--bordering on making things unreliable.
I don't know for how long you have been disconnected, but it's to be expected the updates will pile up and will have to be dealt with at some point.
I'm dual booting Fedora and Windows 10 and I get way fewer updates on Windows than on Linux (every single day there's a new update). I've left a laptop with Fedora alone for 2 months and when I booted it, there were 1.4GB of updates.
Personally I like the bug fixes, improvements and security fixes. I think it's a fair trade-off (on whatever platform you're -- I get app updates on my Android phone every other day).
> I don't know for how long you have been disconnected, but it's to be expected the updates will pile up and will have to be dealt with at some point.
Sure, but have some respect for the user. I told it not to install the updates right now. It shut down in a way where it did not ask to save my work. I also have no choice but to sit and wait for my computer to install updates instead of working. That could easily have been in a situation where it can cause someone to lose critical work, get fired or lose their business.
Because I'm used to daily updates from Fedora, maybe I haven't noticed how frequent/troublesome Windows updates have been lately. I remember reading an article on MSDN explaining how they had reduced the number of required reboots (completely forgot the details), but they need to do more work in this area.
I've also heard about bundling updates for new installs (or people far behind). Last I remember they were still about to roll it out.
This and the Cortana notifications are a real pain.
Workaround is set each WiFi you use as a "Metered Connection" which will avoid updates.