Yet another reason why I am glad that I no longer have to deal with
Windows or Mac anymore as far as production goes (I still run
Windows in VMs, even 10 (I run 98, Vista, 7, 8.1 and 10 on one
computer, but the internet is denied to them (I just mentioned that since there was talk about the older systems), either for retro use or if I need to use mingw for some reason). As an embroiderer that has been doing this since the mid 90s, I can understand Laura's plight (perhaps more then others, I have gone through many iterations of Wilcom, Wings, PE-Designs, DRAWings etc over the years went from
Windows 3 to 7 (as far as for my work) with a Mac thrown in there as well from time to time, not so much with production machines(as in embroidery machines) though).
Not everything that is new, is better then the previous generation, especially when it comes to production (ironically, this is coming from someone that uses a semi rolling release OS). I see a lot of people upgrade just have the latest and supposedly greatest. Only to have bugs that may or may not get fixed by someone else, because the bug that you are dealing with doesn't affect enough people to make it worth fixing, but it can be a pretty significant bug for "you".
I think the yearly major versioning changes that most commercial software vendors (and even with OS, but in MS case its 2 big updates) is where the mistake comes in and also have it mandated (remember, each major "version" of
Windows 10 is only good for 18 months and that's from original release, not when "you" may have gotten it, weeks later sometimes). If vendors were really concerned with making sure people had security and bug fixes, just mandate those, WITHOUT the major changes that new features, deprecations bring with the major updates.
As far as software goes, this is going to be the case from here on out. As long as people still buy into it, it'll be the major thing. Ironically, as much as I despise subscription based software (although my likely hood of participating is still not going to be high), I would much rather at this point have it all browser based that way the major updates of the OS are less likely to affect it and and the updates are kept on the server for the programs. Thankfully, with WASM able to get a lot better RAM usage done in the browser as well (Maya is able to run totally in the browser after all).
Ironically, good ideas can be made bad by poor implementations. While I have no love for automatic updates, I'm still one of those that believes updates are necessary, be it for individual programs or the OS (especially with
Windows due to the sheer amount of legacy code that is still in there). I just firmly believe that the time and place for updates should be left up to the person having to deal with them as they are going to have to be the ones that have to do troubleshooting if something goes wrong and that can make for an inefficient work day if something went wrong. Downside is that people may not upgrade at all, but that's their choice to make as well.