Considering the availability of so many other systems that are equal or better lets assume Mint now has 100 users. Maybe 10% haven’t bothered to update and maybe 1% of those are running an outdated system. I bet he or she is quaking in their boots if they read the blog post.
I think most people are missing the bigger picture. The question that people should ask is not if X are using the latest or what that implies, but WHY. In an ideal world, software updates are: a) 100% reliable b) 100% non-intrusive c) delivered in a seamless way. If you have the above, no one would ever need to complain about updates. Unfortunately, the reality is: a) updates are not that reliable - and getting worse b) highly intrusive also because a c) delivered in a meh way. This is the equation that needs to be solved. Moving users from X to Y merely makes software developers postpone the reckoning with a broken model for later. True for Mint, every other Linux distro, and most operating systems and applications out there. Saying X people haven't moved to the new version can be interpreted in many ways: - Maybe they are lazy or ignorant or spiteful - Maybe they can't - Maybe they won't - Maybe it makes no difference For me, that part of the update landscape is far more telling. Hypothetically speaking - Mint aside - say 50% of users don't want to move to a new version of something. Maybe the new version is bad? Or 50% haven't moved, but there aren't any actual exploits of the old software. Or maybe people tried to move and every single one of them failed in the update process? Or maybe the update process is confusing? And so on. Mrk
Usually laziness or downtime is main reason for average Joe. Updates of webapps are probably the most seamless method. For end user perspective it just means the need to reload the web page - this will load new Javascript code and that's it.
You do have persistence on the backend (company-operated server or "cloud"). Some Webapps allows also to export/download data to local system, but it is just an addition to persistence on backend and isn't that convenient. From the update seamlessness webapps are the best. Did you ever heard that someone used an outdated Google Sheets for months?
There are other types of use cases - other than cloud or remote. Local. How do you handle that reliably? Mrk
Firstly webapps cover more use-cases than you think. Secondly webapps can be designed to work in offline mode and provide at least some basic functionality.
99% of all software out there isn't web apps. Web apps are generally slower when it comes to high-perf requirements. Web != local as the name implies. And reliability factor does not change. Mrk
