Updates Hypocrisy

Tech companies just love forcing updates upon regular users. The idea that someone, somewhere, might be using a version of their software that's a few months old, stops them from sleeping well at night.

This goes all the way from operating systems through big applications all the way down to the tiniest utilities. They will force that update down user's throat, and the most freedom they allow users is to press a 24h snooze button. Some like Microsoft will not even bother asking, and will just reboot user's computer in the middle of whatever they were doing.

And it's not like they make any guarantees about it - if updates break things - and they absolutely will do that - there's usually no way to roll back, and you must be living on a different planet if you imagine you'll get any tech support whatsoever.

So if updates are so important, you'd think at least tech companies would be updating things automatically themselves? Nothing could be further from the truth. They built entire systems like npm's package-lock.json and its equivalents for literally every other programming environment to prevent any updates forever.

Even the idea of operating system updating some shared library dependency is too much, and nowadays everyone bundles all dependency libraries with every application, builds fully static binary, or just puts them in some sort of a fully no-update virtual machine like Docker container.

And it's not just minor packages - tech companies will happily run Python 2 or Java 8 or Debian "stable" a decade after release of their official successors.

So for all that task about importance of updates, this only seems to apply when their costs are borne by someone else.

I believe what tech companies do, not what they say, and I therefore believe that forcing users to update their machines, either by automated updates, or by endless popups without a No button, should be literally illegal. We don't allow manufacturers of physical things to invade your home to "update" your microwave or a book, why should we allow software manufacturers to invade our computers?