SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the if-some-is-good-then-too-much-is-not-enough? dept.
Bruce Byfield's Blog on Linux Magazine explores the upgrade treadmill.
Byfield relates an old comic by Christiann MacAuley that depicts how Linux, Windows, and Mac users relates to a pop-up announcement saying: "An Update is Available for Your Computer".
The Linux user is enthusiastic, the Windows user groans, and the Mac user is glad it will only cost him $99.
One reason for switching to Linux used to be to get off the forced upgrades path common to proprietary software. Yet Linux users seem to have kept the urge to upgrade, even when the necessity was removed. Even when security fixes are back ported, to Long Term Support releases, we just can't seem to resist an upgrade.
Byfield explores the issue of upgrades, and why we Linux users feel compelled to perform major upgrades. Not only the minor patches to fix bugs that happen ever week. We routinely seem to rush in and put our entire systems at risk by installing complete system upgrades to new kernels, whole new desktops, sometimes new file systems, and even the dread systemd.
It's an interesting read, and set me wondering why so many Linux users chase upgrades for little or no new features.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 28 2015, @12:54AM
What Linux version you run is hugely dependent on the apps and services you want to use.
When I first installed Linux and 1992 and for at least a decade afterward, you were not only forced to upgrade but it was particularly painful. A service update would often require a more recent library. That new library would require a newer kernel. That new kernel would break a bunch of apps and services that would need to be updated to the latest release. Having real work to do, this treadmill made me switch to BSD (around 1996) because the BSD revision cycle was slower.
I came back to Linux in around 2005 because of a new job with an existing infrastructure. I was surprised to find that this treadmill was easier but still an issue. Finally (since about Ubuntu 12.04) with LTS type releases from various distributions are stable enough and have finally mostly eliminated this kernel/library headache, but I think it is more about the fact that the major software packages (apache, postgresql, etc.) don't change much these days.
In summary, Linux has only just now caught up to Windows and MacOS in terms of not being forced to upgrade on a regular basis. Maybe people continue to upgrade because they think they still have to.
(Score: 2) by mrchew1982 on Wednesday October 28 2015, @04:43PM
I just reinstalled mint so that I could run OBD Doctor software. The latest version of perl wasn't available in the repo for 15, so instead of hacking it in with the dependency hell that was sure to follow I opted to do a complete reinstall to 17. Less than an hour later I had everything up and running, with a good portion of that time being unattended installation.
Maybe I'm the minority, idk. Usually I just update packages to make sure that any newly released vulnerabilities are patched, that's probably what 90% of people are after. Since passing 30 "new shiny" doesn't get me nearly as excited as it used to, I'm much happier with "just works." I certainly don't have the time to read every single patch note to decide which packages to install, so "update all" is the easiest way to keep things secure.