> For 90% of people, they have always "felt alienated" from their computers. They didn't understand what was happening or why things changed either, and it was easy to get yourself into trouble if you didn't know what you were doing and were trying to figure out how to fix something.
I have stubbornly resisted it, but I think I will go the way of all of my friends and just accept it soon.
I now spend more time doing personal system administration than at any time in my life as a computer user. If you want to have control of your computing devices, you need to spend more time than in the age of five in floppy disks.
Most updates are a one way trip now, and they aren't keep on publishing exactly what features they have removed, so a lot of time is spent disabling updates, firewalling, researching, jailbreaking, imaging, and backing up.
My biggest liability now is not malware, but updates! I have to put all of my development toolchains in virtual machines, because they will break and I can not rely on being able to re-create them. Re-creating my modest workflow is a bi-annual affair, when it really shouldn't be.
And there has been a cultural change in software development as well. Software like Firefox will clobber your data during an update, and when you file a bug report, it will be WONTFIX, and they will say that it is your fault for not using Time Machine and rolling back their changes. They did this awhile back with bookmarks, and they certainly do it with extensions. I had to spend an entire afternoon recovering annotations and citations that were destroyed by a Firefox update, and I was told it was essentially my fault for trusting Firefox and not having hourly backups.
I hate to sound like a broken record, but there was a time when you could reasonably assume that if an update was making major changes, that it would give you the option to go back, or at least export your data if it didn't support it. I really wish the open source community would step up and be different, instead of embracing this.
I have stubbornly resisted it, but I think I will go the way of all of my friends and just accept it soon.
I now spend more time doing personal system administration than at any time in my life as a computer user. If you want to have control of your computing devices, you need to spend more time than in the age of five in floppy disks.
Most updates are a one way trip now, and they aren't keep on publishing exactly what features they have removed, so a lot of time is spent disabling updates, firewalling, researching, jailbreaking, imaging, and backing up.
My biggest liability now is not malware, but updates! I have to put all of my development toolchains in virtual machines, because they will break and I can not rely on being able to re-create them. Re-creating my modest workflow is a bi-annual affair, when it really shouldn't be.
And there has been a cultural change in software development as well. Software like Firefox will clobber your data during an update, and when you file a bug report, it will be WONTFIX, and they will say that it is your fault for not using Time Machine and rolling back their changes. They did this awhile back with bookmarks, and they certainly do it with extensions. I had to spend an entire afternoon recovering annotations and citations that were destroyed by a Firefox update, and I was told it was essentially my fault for trusting Firefox and not having hourly backups.
I hate to sound like a broken record, but there was a time when you could reasonably assume that if an update was making major changes, that it would give you the option to go back, or at least export your data if it didn't support it. I really wish the open source community would step up and be different, instead of embracing this.