The Never-Updaters: Why Some People Refuse to Download New Software

I mostly love updates of FOSS software, each time it feels like receiving a tiny gift from a developer somewhere in another corner of the world. I run Arch so I get multiple gifts each day.<p>On the other hand, I mostly dislike updates of proprietary apps. They tend to be much larger in size (I&#x27;m on a metered connection) and usually don&#x27;t have my best interest in mind.

A classmate of mine was committed to this position. He told me that each time he updated his device he lost functionalist that he liked, was given functionality that he disliked, and of course the issue of greater resources such as battery drainage.

I also hate updates. They practically never solve problems I have but they do break working setups, lose settings, expose me to tutorial&#x2F;walkthrough&#x2F;new feature nags, force me to re-install other software that is now broken, break things like python envs (in the case of a brew update) and golang installs (when MacOS devs fuck with clang), threaten me with reboot loops (Sonoma), rearrange things (why does MacOS keep changing their settings app?), cause existing software to stop working because of API updates that developers can&#x27;t keep up with (Android is particularly bad about this) or just generally force me to close all my shit to restart for the update to take effect.<p>From a developer perspective, even worse (though not exactly the same) is having to modify working code due to developers making arbitrary backwards incompatible changes that I have no choice but to incorporate because node&#x2F;react&#x2F;security etc. updates.<p>Generally speaking, my enthusiasm for software development has fallen off a cliff in no small part because of the bit rot imposed on me from incessant updates.

&quot;If it ain&#x27;t broke, don&#x27;t fix it.&quot;<p>I&#x27;m not aware of ever having been affected by an unpatched vuln, but many times I have lost configs, data, or time to updates.

I take this stance. Almost always, the new software is worse in some way than the old, either taking away some capability to make room for a new product you would have to buy, or by breaking support with hardware you already own. It&#x27;s my position that software was almost universally better 20 years ago.

I don&#x27;t refuse to update software, but I do prefer to wait for as long as possible (preferably until I see a number of reports from others who have updated) and I absolutely don&#x27;t want automatic updates at all.<p>Updating software is risky and can come with functionality loss, unexpected functionality&#x2F;workflow changes, etc. Which means I want to do it when I have a couple of days available to recover from it.

My issue with updates&#x2F;downloading is the lack of software manager to updates software in Windows. It was a pain to go to various websites to download a package and install&#x2F;upgrade a updated version. Back then when I have Win 98SE, I relied on FileHippo to scan and provide information if there are updates for my installed software. In XP and Win7, I only update software that have issue or something that I need to check. It was nice for some software that come with their own updater. I was thinking about my experienxe with Ubuntu (Ibex version) with their apt-get and the package manager. To my surprise, there are package managers for Windows, Chocolatey and Scoop. This was before Windows Store come to fruitation. Chocolatey is my main package manager for my Windows and I had been using it ever since. This allows me to have a peace of mind for me to updates my software particularly command line tools, Chocolatey made it easy for me and automate the environment variables for me if the software needs it. And no more for me to open up Google and search for the name of the software, `choco search &lt;app_name&gt;` and it will give me a list of the software and I just install from there. I use `choco upgrade all -y` and it just handles it without needing my input further.

Some programmers are hell-bent on removing features, particularly those in the graphical world.<p>Take firefox for example, one of my favorites to rag on. Many will tout how quick it has become to which I say &quot;So what? I don&#x27;t allow any javascript&quot;. Or maybe touting new image and video formats. I will just point at libavformat and libavcodec. What they have done is removed xul, removed scrollbars, removed rss, removed the text encoding menu, removed unsigned extensions, and every year there is some new vision about how the ui must look.<p>I am apprehensive of the coming KDE version 6. I can&#x27;t imagine how people must suffer on autoupdating systems whether that is linux, mac, windows, or some godforsaken mobile device.<p>&gt; can’t seem to free up enough space<p>Technical issues are completely understandable. I am lead to believe most devices are tiny and will hide your files from you nor do they easily support external storage. Therefore I am not at all surprised people can&#x27;t remedy this.<p>&gt; unsent messages<p>If you sent it then it was sent. Relying on remote software to delete it is insane. I see all the times people edit a message from matrix. To be honest I see it as a feature and apparently one that would be removed if updated.<p>&gt; When a device no longer gets the newest OS, it’s time to upgrade to a new machine<p>Consoom!

My printer constantly, constantly asks me to update. What is wrong with what it does now? Expecting some shiny new DRM.

I get rizzed by my SO whenever I update software. There&#x27;s a &quot;have fun when it breaks,&quot; aspect that she gets to relish a little bit in when it does!

I&#x27;m refusing to update to Windows 11, and won&#x27;t do until I buy a new machine or something like that, and I wish I could go back to Windows 7, where the task manager doesn&#x27;t get frozen when things go bad or where there are programs like &quot;Settings&quot; made with that Metro&#x2F;UWP apps that go slower than most Electron apps written in JS.

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I don’t know if I fit into the reasons here.<p>I blocked chrome from updating because it would peg my cpu a few times per week. After the 10th time, I stopped the update and haven’t had that problem yet.<p>There aren’t really any new features from chrome I want for weekly updates and the suckiness of their updater. I just reinstall every few years.<p>I also find that updates are usually a pain. They do dumb stuff with cpu and disk. They consume a lot of data (my isp caps me at a TB) and so aren’t a good value.<p>“Security” isn’t a real reason for super frequent updates.

My grandpa can&#x27;t accept windows 10 and had to stuck with win7. I remembered that he actually loves my old hackintosh setup, so when he&#x27;s computer died I bought him a m1 Mac.<p>After spending days with him over TeamViewer and video call, I finally understood that the reason why he couldn&#x27;t accept windows 10 - the desktop icons were moved in a way he doesn&#x27;t remember. (he has hundreds of them, and yes we bought him a big screen)

I&#x27;m interested in points of view from developers-who-deploy-software-changes in one form or another.<p>Why do you &#x2F; do you not accept software updates in your os&#x2F;dependencies&#x2F;packages?<p>Do you naturally gravitate to something like CentOS and&#x2F;or stick to LTS distro releases?<p>How do you reconcile believing that you improve your software against the idea that others make theirs worse?

I&#x27;m typing this on an Essential PH-1 phone I took out of the box a week ago to replace the Essential PH-1 I have been using daily since 2017. I never updated the other phone once and it lasted 6 years of significant use.<p>I did update this one to Android 10 - I don&#x27;t want 6 years out of this one.

Frequent minor updates on F-Droid are why I stopped using a certain developers simple line of apps. F-Droid requires manual updating and I wonder if it occurred to this dev what a timesuck he had turned his apps into.

To be honest, I&#x27;ve rarely lost any functionality because of a new feature release of any software. I can&#x27;t even think of a security update that caused any problems in the last few years.<p>The article mentions iOS and macOS updates and I can relate to that somewhat, though. OS X 10.7 at the time was horrible. It had known memory leaks that never got fixed and you _had_ to update to 10.8 to fix it. There was also a version that introduced a new DNS forwarder which was so broken that Apple rolled it back in a point update.<p>It still seems weird to me to reject any software updates based on broken functionality.<p>Oh, I actually do stay away from updates on one device. My HP printer would reject my third party toner if I would update it and that&#x27;s why I keep it disconnected from the internet.

I hate updating video games. More often then not they remove some awesome exploits or feature that I may want to make use of or removing inappropriate content for censors

My brother--I don&#x27;t know how--has no idea he doesn&#x27;t run updates. He&#x27;ll tell me he does. His iPhone was still on iOS 15 as of a few weeks ago.

on windows i disable system updates, but steam and epic get updates. on linux everything gets updates. this is fine.