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Comment by daave | Hacker News Reader

It's time to let go and trust the developers of the software you're using to know when updates are stable, or when you really need a critical bug or security fix (if you don't trust them, why are you running their software anyway?).

Package managers are a great upgrade from having to manually update individual applications, and are still great for servers or other cases where upgrading can break crucial pieces of infrastructure - but for consumer desktop applications, there's no reason to waste your time doing sysadmin work.

When everything is a web app you'll have to get over it anyway. :)

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I don't see how package managers and developer pushed updates are incompatible concepts. Installing chrome adds a repo to my apt sources, it updates with the rest of my system, weekly and silently. I don't waste my time doing sysadmin work, and I get an up to date browser.

- When you're in a bandwidth-limited situation like browsing over a tethered phone

- When you're using an access point operated by someone you don't trust

- When you want the best performance out of your system but need to have a browser open

- When any spike in latency could have bad consequences

- (possibly) when there's a significant chance of the computer losing power instantly and without warning

Five reasons I don't auto-update anything.

For some things? Absolutely. For everything I currently use? The three hours I spent last week downgrading my Xorg thanks to a botched nvidia driver update force me to disagree.

Granted, it was an nvidia driver update; I should have known better. But that's exactly my point.

I don't get the point.

Was the nvidia driver update forced upon you and done behind your back? Or - did you do that intentionally and broke (by accident) stuff?

If the latter (and that's what it sounds like to me), isn't that totally unrelated to silent software updates and just anecdotal bad press about the nvidia driver and its stability?

He is saying something he wants to control the updates on, obviously the important stuff. The video driver is very important, but the browser is also very important, since a lot of people would not be able to get work done without it.

Exactly. I chose to update my video driver, so I knew what broke.

Imagine that update had happened automatically. Perhaps the day before a big deadline -- a stellar choice for disaster to strike! Now I'd have no clue what just broke and now I'd have to spend hours fixing it.

Intrusive updates shouldn't be automatic.

>It's time to let go and trust the developers of the software you're using to know when updates are stable, or when you really need a critical bug or security fix (if you don't trust them, why are you running their software anyway?).

I agree partially. My point is that you absolutely need the ability to turn it off. Always. But I'm fine with it being the default because that's what is most useful for the majority of users.

>When everything is a web app you'll have to get over it anyway. :)

You'll have to pry locally running programs out of my cold dead fingers. Web apps are fine for incredibly simple things. For everything else, they are as much buzzword bullshit bingo as the cloud.

That makes sense for security fixes and other internal issues. I would love an update that makes things faster. What I object to are auto-updates that change the user interface. In my opinion ANY interface changes should be user directed. If the new interface is better in some way, take the time and explain why.

EDIT: spelling

No way. A new release of my CAD software always screws something up. Unfortunately, it seems like some software is just too old and complicated to test thoroughly and cost effectivly.

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