My understanding is DHJ had stopped doing OS updates at some point. (He is an Apple user).
Personally (Windows 11), I am concerned about doing this because I would fall further and further behind (minor) updates and I am concerned I will eventually have some issue that will be difficult for me to solve. In this case I would rather be with “the herd” so, if there is a problem, it is not unique to my system.
On the other hand, I am tempted to (try) to stop all updates. My system is stable and I probably have everything I need for a long time. (Windows is very sneaky in either installing updates without you knowing or somehow tricking you into installing them).
Could we do a survey (separate for Windows and Apple) of user to determine how many are following DHJ’s course of stopping all OS (minor) updates? (Major updates to new OS (Ventura, Senoma, Sequoia and Windows 10, Windows 11) is a different story).
Just to be clear, I have dedicated laptops for touring and those
are the ones I don’t update - not even for major updates.
Unless an update (minor or major) actually addresses a problem, then the update is just gratuitous and the subsequent headaches aren’t worth the trouble.
It would take a really incredible (“can’t live without”) plugin (say) for me to even consider updating those machines and fortunately all the plugins I need/want work back to macOS 10
Like @npudar I have a series of computers, which allows for updating on a non-critical machine first with thorough testing to make sure it is fully compatible before updating the performance machines.
I have two Macs. I typically do minor updates first on the office/non music/testing iMac, then after some time I also update my gigging MBP - no serious trouble so far.
For major OS updates I typically wait for the .1 or better .2 version - this is also often the time, when nearly all plug-in providers have tested or provided updates.
This saved me a lot of headaches in the past… Then also: first the iMac, later on the MBP
Yes, I try to update my back up “rehearsal” laptop first.
So far my main glitches of Windows updates appear to be losing my GP activation, losing activations of the Soundpaint and Orchestral Tools plugins, and (more often) OSC being turned off. (Not sure if an update was responsible for increased throttling (or losing the benefit of “turbo”), which I finally fixed by installing Throttlestop).
I am not a gigging musician, so for me the risk of updating is more or less zero. And I like messing around and trying to solve riddles, so if something breaks from an update it’s not like it’s really a bad thing for me. It gives me something interesting to do.
Plus I think that on the rare chance it really screws something up, I could potentially be somebody’s hero for a day by coming on here and saying “DON’T DO THE 1H25 EARLY-RELEASE TEST UPDATE!”
But that hasn’t happened yet. Windows 11 updates have actually been pretty good to me.
As I’m not gigging for a living and I only have 1 laptop (Windows 11) that I use for playing and for usual things like browsing, adminstration and so on, I do regularly updates. (But not a few hours before the time I need it to play). So far, so good.
Btw: I’m going to be very cautious with the next upcoming Windows 25h1, because the multimedia implementation (especially MIDI), is getting a big overhaul.
I always install updates but do a bit of research and maybe some testing on whether they are known to break things I use. If I don’t know, I’d rather try and if something is broken I’ll roll back.
The reason is I don’t have computers dedicated to GP only, they serve other purposes as well, have sensitive data, and I need to access resources at work that require more or less up to date systems.
There were some cases when I needed to defer updates for as long as I could - NI plugins took a long time to support whatever Mac OS version broke them, I don’t remember now. But generally updates aren’t as disruptive.
Mac OS is a much bigger pain in the butt than Windows with regard to updates, in my experience. When my main OS was Windows, I worried much less about these issues.
Interesting statement! When I changed from Windows to macOS a looooong time ago I felt the other way around.
Windows improved here, and Apple broke up some things with major upgrades. But I still never want to go back. Looking at my office Windows 11 machine and my Macs at home I try to get at home as early as I can
Did NI ever fix it? I still hate and love Kontakt…
Yes, for the most part. They dropped something altogether (Absynth, if I’m not mistaken).
That’s a different question.
I am okay to work with any of the OSes, and avoid using anything that’s not cross platform where possible - i.e. of course I’ll use App Store, but not iCloud for anything apart from backups.
I generally prefer Windows to Mac OS, although I’m quite comfortable working with the latter. There are many things that are just done better in Windows - window management, restore points, I like FileHistory much better than Time Machine, etc. OS updates are typically not as disruptive because for Microsoft backwards compatibility is more important, and typically if an update breaks something that’s a bug you can expect them to fix, whereas Apple just doesn’t care. Regarding audio, hardware relies on class drivers implemented by Apple, which is a good thing (the famous “you don’t need drivers on a Mac” misconception), but also a bad thing since if an update breaks something you’d likely need a firmware update to tix, etc. Then Mac OS doesn’t have font scaling, which is very annoying - I have a 4K monitor but use it at 2K because otherwise the fonts are too small for me. Not to mention that I can have a windows laptop with a 4K screen, connect it to an external 4K monitor, turn on font scaling for the monitor, and things will look proportionally similar on a bigger screen but everything will be super crisp. With Macs, it just doesn’t work. I set up my GP on a Mac Mini connected to a 4K monitor, with 4K everything is microscopic, so I change it to 2K, then I open the gig file on my laptop with whatever retina resolution it has, and fonts are way too large, not fitting anywhere and things look ugly.
But Apple is just a much better proposition now in terms of hardware. Apple Silicon is awesome in terms of performance for audio and video, there’s no really good alternative to Mac Mini (I tried several including Intel NUCs), and generally while there are good Windows laptops they are more expensive then Macs now. And they will heat like crazy.
Yes, so is Time Machine but it will incrementally back up OS changes as well so if you upgraded your Mac on Wednesday evening (say) and on Friday you discover a flaw, you can just go back to Wednesday morning (say) and recover. In other words, there’s no need to distinguish between user data and OS stuff, so restore points aren’t needed.
It’s easier to use for the stuff I really need - restoring an individual file. Restoring the whole OS to a previous point is something I did only once, I think, and windows restore points are fine for that, I also don’t need one solution for two distinct use cases.
It has been much more reliable for me. First, Time Machine doesn’t work on one of my computers, and Apple Support hasn’t been able to figure out why in over a month now. Second, it doesn’t let me add one of the usb drives, it has some limitations about what you can and cannot include in backups. Third, it’s finicky about a special partition you need to have, you can’t just use any drive for that. And when that drive isn’t sufficient anymore, you can’t add another one, you need to purchase a new one, transfer stuff there etc. Fourth, when it fails to backup a single file for whatever reason, it just stops and doesn’t back up anything. And you would only notice it because the icon in the menu bar changes or some such.
