I'm old and grumpy and I just want my computers to work. Even though I did spend a lot of years hacking more than a dozen different UNIX flavors, it is close to 15 years since I found the easter-egg hunt of upgrading he OS even vaguely satisfying.
About a decade ago I discovered Ubuntu. I had just gotten a new ThinkPad and I needed to install Linux on it. I started the install and went back to hacking. At the end of the day I checked in my code and I remembered that oh fuck I'm installing Linux and now it is time to fight with X11 for the rest of the day in order to get a vaguely acceptable X11 setup. Better call my wife and say that I'd be spending the rest of the evening at the office swearing at my computer and using the competition's search engine to look for "X11" and "ThinkPad".
Except that didn't happen. I touched the keyboard and there was the X11 login screen. Just like that. Wow.
And Ubuntu just kept getting better over the next years. Until it reached a point where upgrading it was just a matter of running a few commands and reboot. Neat.
Of course, some time in 2006 I developed a serious case of suspend-envy and I ditched Ubuntu for OSX and a MacBook Pro. Imagine that: just being able to slap your laptop closed, carry it off somewhere, open it and it would just work. Without me having to spend about one man-week per year trying to make my laptop not self-destruct by burning its way through my backpack.
Funny that: me growing tired of constantly having to manage the operating system and fiddle around with the kernel to make my computer stay out of my way while I am programming.
It took me a good 6 months to get used to all the annoying aspects of using a Mac to develop software. But you know what: I got to spend more time programming and less dicking around with the OS so I was happy.
Of course, in 2008 I got the crazy idea that I wanted to store all my photos on a computer that had a decent filesystem. FreeBSD had ZFS, so while I wasn't overly fond of FreeBSD, I thought ZFS was worth the hassle. The downside is that FreeBSD, while a good basic OS, never quite grew up. It is still a pain in the ass to manage because it is no different from back in the 1990s when I made a living setting up SunOS machines for the math and chemistry department at my local university. Or dicking around with Ultrix at the mechanics dept. Upgrading the OS back then was like performing brain surgery. You needed notes and you needed to remember all the weird-ass quirks and pitfalls.
The other day I realized that my storage server is running an old version of FreeBSD and could do with an upgrade. Only I've forgotten the procedure and when reading up on it I realized that ... boy this sucks ass.
What is mostly annoying is that people think this is okay. It is like having to listen to people who think that the Model T Ford was the pinnacle of automotive usability: http://www.modelt.ca/drive-fs.html
This is 2013. Excuse me if I don't find manually upgrading operating systems amusing.