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Comment by popcorncowboy | Hacker News Reader

At what point do we start to hold software and software providers to a higher standard?

A multi-trillion dollar company releases an upgrade to its flagship operating system and "anyone who knows anything" smiles and nods because we understand that actually USING the upgrade runs a high enough chance to brick your device that doing so without a backup is a rube cliche.

I get it. But my question stands.

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And it's not like it's under Linux or Windows where target hardware configuration is more or less unknown. Building both software and hardware by Apple supposed to be advantage of Macs.

I absolute agree with you, it's an absolute disgrace and while I am all in on holding Apple, MS or Google responsible for their shit, any law in that regard would most likely only affect the livelihood of your friendly neighborhood OS developer, but not actually Apple & Co.

We do hold them accountable ... by using Apple :( It's not like Linux or Windows upgrades are drastically smoother. In fact right now I have a Windows VM that tells me "This PC doesn't meet the requirements to upgrade to Windows 11" in the upgrade screen, and their health check app tells me "This PC meets the requirements". Probably something got cached somewhere, as I had to add a virtual TPM just now. But still. This kind of experience is routine, with Windows. Like, why is the health check app not built in? Why is there a separate tool to begin with? Why doesn't it use their latest app packaging and distribution system instead of a sucky old MSI file? It constantly feels like there's nobody at the head of the ship with Windows.

NixOS updates are drastically smoother, if default option to boot into any of previous updates is enough to never overthink it

Haiku [operating system], while not ready for most people to use ar a daily driver, also has this ability to boot into prior state. Updated an app, or the whole system, and now something's gone pear-shaped? Reboot with the magic key held down and choose a previous config by date-time.

I don't think a platform that requires you to learn a custom functional programming language can be described as having smoother updates, really.

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