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Comment by twobeard | Hacker News Reader

It's a good thing? Yeah, except that you waste half an hour EACH DAY staring at automatic software updates. At this point I simply disable automatic updates for much of the programs on my PC. This fashion of quick release cycles has gone way overboard.

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Why do you need to actually look at them? Apart from the long windows reboots/updates, I don't really see any application doing upgrades in the foreground anymore.

Or are there still some badly behaving update apps out there?

Half an hour? Really? I spend maybe 5 seconds a day dealing with FF's updates.

Oh my god, that's ridiculous. Nobody spends half an hour a day waiting on auto updates. The update downloads in the background and takes just a few seconds to install after restarting the browser.

Then Flash prompts for an update, then Acrobat Reader, then Java...

Then Mozilla Thunderbird, then TortoiseGit, then TortoitseSVN, then Sublime Text Editor, then Notepad++, then Notepad++ informs me there is an update of a plugin that I never use, then VLC media player, then Google Chrome, then Oracle VirtualBox, then Visual Studio proudly announces a service pack, then Windows informs me that it wants to reboot in 10 minutes.

get a mac

Yea, get a mac just for that. Oh and please just forget that all present *nix based distros will have a similar, if not better, update manager.

That is annoying! And one of the many reasons I am happy to have switched to Linux.

I strongly dislike the fact that almost every single piece of software wants to also install some kind of always running service to manage updates. It should be an OS hook that programs can use when they are first installed, and can be completely managed by the user if they care.

Like some kind of package manager?

On Windows? Good luck with that!

If you run windows and don't use Ninite yet, let me make your day:

https://ninite.com/updater/

http://chocolatey.org/

Open up a command prompt ...

  C:\> cup

... and done.

Ninite has an updater?

You made my day right now.

Then Avast Antivirus pops up and says your software update status is critical! Do something or let me manage it for you (pay me) !

I have a Windows 7 PC but it is only used perhaps once every week or two (and usually for just a few minutes at a time). It's certainly not the best tool I've ever seen but Chocolatey [0] makes keeping (nearly all) my installed applications up-to-date very easy.

[0]: http://chocolatey.org/

Is this at work?

Then Windows Update: "Your computer will restart in 10 minutes". Postpone 4 hours. Glad I'm on Ubuntu 99% of the time nowadays.

in fact, it doesnt even "restart it". its applied whenever the user restart the browser. it only notifies the user if he never restart the browser, after a day or two..

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