But when those decisions affect others? When your computer becomes part of a botnet and is used to attack a target then it's no longer just your problem anymore. The responsibility to prevent this must lie somewhere, either with the user or with the manufacturer. And Microsoft would rather force the updates on users and occasionally be in the news for a botched one than to constantly be in the news for botnets of hundreds of thousands of "abandoned" Windows PCs, or the constant complaint that Windows is insecure because people keep their PCs stuck on the same version they came with.
To use some very current imagery, imagine if someone walked around coughing in your face saying the decision whether to wear a mask or not is theirs.
Further your argument draws a connection but its spurious a sufficient difference in degree is a difference in kind. The way in which we comport ourselves while sick have the potential on net to kill millions of people where as the peril implied by users failing to update windows has never resulted in peril of that magnitude. Further one can reasonably suppose that one can with sufficient care design a system where updates are on by default and we don't create perverse situations which inspire many users to turn them off entirely.
For example one in which applications are updated without disturbing or interrupting the users workflow, where updates aren't effective until the user reboots, where applications are isolated from their underlying environments where users can roll back and pin a particular version if a new version is buggy or undesirable. Where major changes to entire user interfaces are rare and opt in for years.
How many are going to bother disabling updates?
Please don't make unfounded accusations and personal attacks based on suppositions. It was just an easy to understand analogy of how your decisions can have consequences beyond yourself, and does the job without any hint of "emotional weight". The rest is in the eye of the beholder.
> have the potential on net to kill millions of people
Talk about manipulative and lending undue emotional weight to your argument. Nothing gives weight to your own words like not following them yourself.
> one can reasonably suppose that one can with sufficient care design a system where updates are on by default and we don't create perverse situations which inspire many users to turn them off entirely.
This supposition didn't fare well in reality because it's easy to suppose but hard to implement. Especially when talking about a very complex system that has to be put in the hands of ~87+% of computer users out there, and work with tens of thousands of combinations of hardware, software and different configurations. And perhaps the most critical aspect is that the perverse incentives are left to the judgement of users with little to no understanding of the system or the wider implications of misusing it. They are more likely to follow terrible advice because the explanation for the good advice is too complicated. This is why the easy to understand analogy was useful.
This is true of capitalism and democracy. The worst choice for economics or governance except for all the other choices. I want a system that respects the users judgement not yours. No matter how well meaning you can't adopt the perspective of all users nor do I desire to see the mediocre results of smart people who know better than their users trying.
It's actually not that hard. If you make updates something that silently happens periodically without interrupting the users or making many changes to the UI that the users rely on they will let you update the parts they don't directly touch all you want to secure their systems.
When you want to make major changes make them opt in and test them to ensure they are actually substantially superior. After a while deprecate the old UI. People will tolerate infrequent major changes far better than constant small breaking changes to their workflow.
Again if you don't make updates suck you don't have to coerce people into doing them. If you are figuring out how to coerce users for their own good you are solving the wrong problem.
(That kinda reminds me of "trust us, we're the government and we know what's best for you".)
Sorry, but that goes against everything that this whole "free software" thing stands for.
Or, why we have regulations to protect workers. Everyone doesn't have to share your worldview. There are plenty of reasons why these changes are happening. The people making the changes are normally aware of their trade-offs.
Change is the key word. If the world was better before from the perspective of the designer then they are unlikely to have changed anything, or introduced an approach you disagree with. The choice is for you: accept it, or find an alternative. That's they way of the market, no?
>> Sorry, but that goes against everything that this whole "free software" thing stands for.
I agree. Ubuntu is a particular vision of free software. They can do it the way they want. There are way that you can do free software the way that you want to have it.
you vastly underestimate the amount of changes which are just done because people have to justify doing things in order to get a paycheck
Of course, since it’s my hardware I just uninstalled Ubuntu and went with something that gave me more control.
The problem is that "power users" can't be trusted to use this power responsibly, or they operate based on assumptions that won't always be true. Either way they end up hurting other people in enough situations that this becomes an ecosystem issue.
Power users often help others set up their systems like they do, but those users can't manage them. Other times, power users will move on. When they were managing the systems, it wasn't a problem. Now that someone else is, the systems stop getting updated and someone has to clear up the mess. Yes, good power users help transition things properly, but don't kid yourself on the number of times this actually happens.
This phenomenon is prevalent in software. Just looks at the defaults which "power users" frequently choose (cf. JWT).