Ask HN: Do you instal an upgrade the day it's out? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you instal an upgrade the day it's out?

7 pointsdmitryame3 comments

I have this itch, the moment a beta release is out -- I gota have it. A week ago was a really big day -- I spend few hours upgrading to (all still in beta) Mac OS 10.13, XCode 9, IOS 11, Watch OS 4. Not surprising, quite a few things break and everything is sloooooow to the point it's embarrassing and I have to explain to coworkers why I can't answer Skype calls reliably any more, and why can't I share my screen on gotomeeting. I actually do not mind that I have to reboot my computer more often than usual because it freezes. But, there is this special feeling of beeing on the bleeding edge, touching the newest thing with my own hands -- how can one beat that argument? I anticipate reactions, some may say -- stupid. And I'm just wondering, how common this "stupidity" is? Am I the only one who has this itch? How do others cope with embarrassing situations that arise because of beeing on the bleeding edge?

I usual bide my time on commercial upgrades on important machines (the big Cos have no qualms on pulling the rug out from under you on an upgrade.) I'll let the bleeding edge guys beta test it for a few months till theres a decimal version available and that I can be assured nothing will break in the upgrade,.

Now on Linux, I have played with stuff on the day of release on a secondary system, mainly to see what works better, what's not broken anymore, and what still works (hasen't been broken or deprecated). Still takes me a while before initiating an upgrade on my main machines but its good to check.

I keep the bleeding-edge and stable stuff side by side whenever possible, for ex. keep both the stable and alpha versions of Firefox installed together and generally use the bleeding-edge versions as daily drivers.

If I am doing something extremely important like payments or making a project for some non-tech clients where stability is paramount I stick to the stable builds unless the betas solve some major issue or have some required features.

I work in Operations, so unless it is a major security fix, I would never install anything on a day one/two/etc, but rather wait and see and after that install in the lab / pre-prod first...

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