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How do you guys handle software updates?

W

William Payne

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 10, 2017
931
360
Wanganui, New Zealand.
I've been thinking about this lately. Everytime a software updates happens there seems to be a huge panic on here with people getting stuck because an update killed their web driver or whatever. Or some bug. Which has always made me scratch my head thinking hey if your machine is vital just wait a few days before updating to get confirmation on the new driver.

Now with windows machines I've just always let things update automatically but that was on a home pc, never really mattered.

What I'm wondering is how many people just update automatically vs updating themselves when they choose?

I was watching a video of a PC workstation being built at Puget Systems and they said that for their business workstations they build for customers they never let any software update straight away. They will wait up to a month in case of bugs and then have a scheduled time for updates as I said upto a month after the updates been released.

I'm considering doing that with my Mac. Just having a day a month where I let it update with whatever updates came out the month before.

I can't think of any reason that it would be necessary to update anything straight away unless it was a bug fix.
 
I typically wait a week for small updates to see what the problems are. For a new MacOS I would wait 6-12 months, usually closer to the 12 months, for it to mature.

With Nvidia web drivers it is essentially a mandatory wait of a day or two after an OS update for new drivers to come out.

As for Windows, which may be off topic, I'm a bit unhappy about the combination of major feature updates and the fact that they are forced. Windows Millennium caused me and many others a lot of trouble. And even though there are ways to temporarily delay updates, you can't really afford to wait a long time because the Windows user base is a big fat target for exploits and you need to stay updated. So I feel that I have little to no choice there and just have to hope for the best.
 
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Mac OS X - for major updates, I try and wait until at least x.2. Sometimes I cave and go earlier, depending on which of my Macs I am considering for update, and the state it's in. I jumped too soon on 10.13, not realizing the nvidia driver support on 2013 MBPs was a mess. After a major update, I usually do the dot updates right away - within a few days.

I have a work 2014-15-MBP, and they usually send out the "all clear" around x.2 or x.3. Lots of interrelated bits have to work.

When I ran Winows as a primary OS, the forced updates drove me crazy. They (and the associated reboots) rarely happened at a convenient time.
 
I like to be on the cutting edge and to tinker.

I have two MacBooks. One always runs the most current version of macOS and all other software. The other usually runs beta's. I find all kinks and obstacles in the beta-MacBook and by the time software goes to release, I have workarounds ready for any issues that may arise.
 
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KvR said:
I like to be on the cutting edge and to tinker.

I have two MacBooks. One always runs the most current version of macOS and all other software. The other usually runs beta's. I find all kinks and obstacles in the beta-MacBook and by the time software goes to release, I have workarounds ready for any issues that may arise.
Click to expand...

May I ask exactly as to why you like this way of doing things? I mean that in a nice way.
 
KvR said:
I like to be on the cutting edge and to tinker.

I have two MacBooks. One always runs the most current version of macOS and all other software. The other usually runs beta's. I find all kinks and obstacles in the beta-MacBook and by the time software goes to release, I have workarounds ready for any issues that may arise.
Click to expand...
I’m somewhat similar. I have one Mac and one iPad running betas, but the rest wait.
 
ActionableMango said:
Windows Millennium caused me and many others a lot of trouble.
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Brother, Windows Millenium was released 17 years ago. Give it a break. ;)

ActionableMango said:
As for Windows, which may be off topic, I'm a bit unhappy about the combination of major feature updates and the fact that they are forced.
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I own several and manage many Win10 systems, and have only had one problem with the feature updates. My home workstation (same basic hardware as the hex MP6,1) has 64 TB of disk on a 3ware/LSI/Avago/Broadcom 9750 SAS RAID controller.

After the last two feature updates, the controller became unusable - constant resets. I reverted the first time, and ignored the attempts to update. When the latest feature update came out, I let it install. Again, constant resets and unusable. Reverted again.

The problem isn't really Microsoft -- it's that LSI bought 3ware then Avago bought LSI then Broadcom bought Avago, and there's no longer driver support for an 8 year old card after three acquisitions. (The latest driver is from 2011 - so it's a Windows 7 driver.)

I ordered a LSI 9380 12 Gbps MegaRAID SAS 9380-8e with 1 GiB cache and CacheVault (battery backup for the cache) - and will install it over the holiday weekend. And then try the upgrade again.

(Note that the disk to controller bandwidth is 96 Gbps (about 12 GBps), so the 7.9 GBps PCIe 3.0 x8 slot can be the bottleneck.)
 
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Have more than one system ( even if it is just SSD on a USB dongle ) and make backups.
 
William Payne said:
I've been thinking about this lately. Everytime a software updates happens there seems to be a huge panic on here with people getting stuck because an update killed their web driver or whatever. Or some bug. Which has always made me scratch my head thinking hey if your machine is vital just wait a few days before updating to get confirmation on the new driver.

Now with windows machines I've just always let things update automatically but that was on a home pc, never really mattered.
Click to expand...

IIRC, when Win2000-SP3 was released, I immediately updated, not knowing (in-kind with the devs @MS, FFS!) that it was handicapped with a buggy NTFS implementation . . . I lost (what I thought--at the time--"was") a large amount of data . . . a Real bummer, as I had not yet devised a proper backup strategy ;/

William Payne said:
What I'm wondering is how many people just update automatically vs updating themselves when they choose?
Click to expand...

Conscious choice, tempered with judicious enthusiasm <smile>

I do not worry one-bit these days, as I have copies of copies of copies . . .

William Payne said:
I can't think of any reason that it would be necessary to update anything straight away unless it was a bug fix.
Click to expand...

The immediacy of education and the thrill of currency drives the madness, as we press our hands to the metal.

This last week I have been installing/re-installing a custom setup in Funtoo on my Dell, and I became educated as to "What can I do with all this RAM?" . . . RAM I cannot seem to occupy in regular processing.

I relegated 20GB to a tempfs ramdisk dedicated soley to /var/tmp/portage, and my #emerge comps have been cut into (probably-more-than) eighths.

We learn by doing things, but we learn more by doing other things.

Regards, splifingate
 
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