> Also this is kind of why everything is ever so slightly broken, IMHO.
OTOH, things that update too often seem to be more than slightly broken on an ongoing basis, due to ill-advised design changes, new bugs and regressions, etc.
The problem with bug full updating software is usually that they don’t release changes fast enough, ironically.
Apple routinely holds back changes for a .0 release for advertising reasons. This means that they routinely have big releases that break everything at once. Bugs could come from 4 or 5 different sets of changes. But if they spread out changes… bug sources would be way more easy to identify.
And bug fix velocity going up could mean people stop treading water on bugs, and actually get to making changes to avoid entire classes of bugs!
Instead, people think the way to avoid bugs is to avoid updates, or do it all at once. This leads to iOS .0 releases being garbage, users of non-rolling release Linux distros to have bugs in their software that were fixed upstream years ago, and ultimately to make it harder to actually fix bugs.
As a user, my problem is that I receive functional or design changes that I didn't want and that make the software worse for me. So I tend to avoid updates. e.g. the last time I updated Android was for that webp cve. Otherwise I just want it to stay the way it was when I bought it, not how some new product designer wants to make it to show their "impact". Especially when it's things like "we're going to silently uninstall your apps (Google) and/or delete your files (Apple) and add nag screens when you turn off our malware (Google again) or add ads (Microsoft)".
I do regularly install updates on my (Linux) desktop/laptop because guess what? It consistently works exactly the same afterward. Occasionally new formats like jxl images just start working everywhere or something. But otherwise it has just continued to work unchanging with no fanfare for the last decade or so. It's amazing to me how much higher quality in that way volunteer software is compared to commercial software.
This means they should either push updates quickly on an ongoing basis, or not push them at all and provide service packs at regular intervals like Windows XP and 7 used to do.
I am thinking with things that don't update often, we just get used to the broken parts. People learned to save every five minutes in Maya since the app crashes so often, for example. Every now and then, a PuTTY session will fill the screen with "PuTTYPuTTYPuTTYPuTTYPuTTY[...]" but it's been that way for at least 20 years, so it's not that remarkable.
When I was in Systems/Linux Operations you wouldn’t believe how many tickets from other internal teams we supported that said “Putty is down” in the title. It never ceased to make me chuckle every single time.
tangent but i havent seen that happen on any of my putty clients in years and i use it everyday, so i think that finally got fixed? or maybe was a side effect of something stupid
Putty met my needs in 2004 and my needs haven't changed. It still works as good in 2024.
I'm not 100% sure when I started using putty, but I definitely used it in 2004. I still need a ssh client and terminal emulator for Windows. I still don't want to install a unix like environment just to have a terminal. I still don't want tabs in my terminal, lots of windows works just fine. I still need X11 forwarding so I can run programs on remote systems and display them on Windows (VcXsrv is an easier to get going X server than others I've used on Windows).
I might like to have something that can do whatever magic so I can gcloud and aws auth on my remote machine without cutting and pasting giant urls and auth blobs to and fro all the time; but I'm using a auth token that needs to stay connected to the windows machine. In a more integrated corp environment this would probably be keberos/active directory/magic?
The difference in 2024 is that windows ships openssh client and server as a built-in optional component and it also ships a workable terminal emulator. No WSL needed in either case.
I've started to dropping of Putty since WSL1 and later native openssh-client landed into Windows. I was missing ability to use ~/.ssh/config - comparing to Putty's GUI way of changing things, especially en-masse, like updating JumpHost for 10+ servers (saved session in Putty terms) and no inheritance of options.
So I'm not using Putty since I guess ~ 2018 or so. Not insisting other should stop using it, of course.
Because Windows does not have a good SSH implementation and PuTTY has always worked extremely well for me as a serial and SSH terminal (also, it starts up instantly and never crashed on me).
I like having a library of hosts to choose and maybe multiple tabs in one place, and although there are some slightly less cumbersome PuTTY frontends like KiTTY (please keep your expectations very very low), I'll rather use WinSCP (no quantum leap in usability either). Edit: to those suggesting W10 command line - yes it's there and works, but it's just that, a command line, not much help when you have dozens of servers.
I do like 99% of the time and in quite specific cases from the host machine (Windows native openssh) - mainly due to my environment is in WSL in terms of dotfiles, cmd line prompt, shell history and so on.
I still use putty because it does what I need for it to do. No need to change just because MS has their own terminals application, which besides I far from trust.
There's trust in the security sense, which yeah, you're stuck with the whole deal.
But there's also trust in the rely on sense. Which at least I try to compartmentalize. I can trust Microsoft (or Google) to make an OS I can rely on to run other people's apps. If Microsoft or Google want to provide apps, they'll be evaluated as they are, not with a bias because the OS provider shipped them.
I don't have a problem using OpenSSH, really. But I'm not going to use a Microsoft terminal emulator, unless it has some advantage over the terminal emulator I've been using for decades, when the Microsoft product has no advantage other than Microsoft included it with the OS so I can save a 3.5 MB download. Same reason I don't use Internet Explorer / Edge / new Edge or Windows Media Player. On a level playing field, I would never use those products (well that's not true, IE 3 was ok when it came out, IE 4 and 6 were good when they were new, but I don't have a time machine), so why use them because the field is unlevel.
There's some obscure settings that putty supports that other terminals do (did?) not. It's been a while so I don't remember all the details, but for example, some systems expected the DEL key and not Ctrl-C to interrupt. You can change the interrupt key with `stty` on other terminals, but it only allows setting the key to a single character, and DEL is typically an escape sequence.
And the reasonable answer is to judge proposed changes in terms of their impact to stability, and make relevant risk/reward tradeoffs (and ideally including risk mitigation within the scope of the change).
The current milieu seems dramatically skewed toward churning out low-value changes without sufficiently considering the impact to stability, causing frequent breakage, and resulting in net negative value.
OTOH, things that update too often seem to be more than slightly broken on an ongoing basis, due to ill-advised design changes, new bugs and regressions, etc.