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Comment by JackSlateur | Hacker News Reader

In your day-to-day life, you do chore regurarly

Why not cleaning the room only once every 2-3 years ?

I do chores regularly, and I apply security patches regularly.

Major operating system version upgrades can be more akin to upgrading all the furniture and electronics in my house at the same time.

Not that you’ll agree, but cleaning the house sounds more like running rm -rf /tmp and docker system prune than upgrading from idk, bullseye to bookworm. Let’s call that a bathroom remodel? So sometimes you live in a historic house and the bathroom cannot be remodeled or changed because it’ll fall through the floor or King Louis the XV used it once. In software, the historic house could be the PLLc firmware controlling the valves in your nuclear reactor cooling loop.

You keep using this analogy, but it is not comparable, and it is a horrible analogy.

Why not force everyone to upgrade their cars every 2 to 3 years?

Because it has physical consequences ?

Remove that, tell everybody : "hey, for 30min of your time, you can get a new car every 6 months"

See how everybody will get new cars :)

And then the new car no longer has the camera where you need it, the panel buttons changed, the cup-holder is in another place. Even worse, the upgraded firmware & OS of the car no longer comes with an app you needed; or it does, but removed a feature that was essential for your daily use. All because some SWE takes "computer security" as more important than having an useful system.

It's the kind of rhetoric that enables shoving down user-hostile features during a simple update. And breaking many use cases. Quite common in the FOSS/Linux mentality, not so much on the rest of the world.

Why don't you move house every 6 months?

OTOH I never lived 5 years in the same place and I think it is not that bad of an idea when I look at the sheer amount of unused or barely used shit people hoard over the years in their house.

Then one day people's health or econoly dwindle, they need to move to a place without stairs or to a city center clother to amenities such as groceries, pharmacy and healthcare without relying on a car they cannot drive safely anymore, and moveming becomes a huge task. Or they die and their survivors have to take on the burden of emptying/donating/selling all that shit accumulated over the years.

Every move I assessed what I really needed and what I didn't and I think my life is better thanks to that.

I understand this is a YMMV thing. I am not saying everyone should move every couple of years. But to many people that isn't that big of a deal and it can be also considered in a very positive way.

> I look at the sheer amount of unused or barely used shit people hoard over the years in their house.

Or they could spend a weekend and get rid of that stuff for 10% of the stress of moving.

Last time I lived somewhere too long I got called to jury duty, so you're not entirely wrong!

Upgrade != replace with something new (like using another OS or whatever)

Backward incompatible change means there is cost associated. It is like changing your furniture every 6 months. New furniture is fun, but unless your needs have changed (like marriage, children), it won't add you any benefit other than a new look...

update/upgrade == replacing with something worse.

"because that's what you do" is not a valid justification.

This is a pretty nevrosed way of seeing the world

How often do you remodel your house?

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