I hate it. As long as it can be disabled, it’s fine, I guess. A forced update with automatic reboot is annoying at best, and hazardous at worst.

For starters, there’s this navigation and radar system by Furuno called TimeZero (formerly known as MaxSea), and it’s objectively a pretty good piece of software, with the caveat that it runs on windows. More than once have I been contacted by someone needing help to prevent their radar from suddenly reboot8ng while they’re navigating in the dark through shallow water full of reefs.

Secondly, relevant XKCD:

I think automatic updates should be opt-out and all previous releases made available. Realistically, most people are probably glad to have the latest and greatest version of software on their device. But people who know, know.

I am really uncomfortable with them, but there isn’t a clear alternative given that our computing environments are designed in a way to be inherently insecure, patching exploits as they occur is the only plan other than not using the internet. But it means that the people with the keys to the software can install what they want on your computer and probably take it over. You could check every update yourself and compile it from source yourself if it’s open source, but that would be too much work.

They aren’t inherently good or bad.
For the average person they tend to be fine.
For critical business or governments who need their machines to operate 💯. It makes sense to manage their own, with cautious limited test rollouts and what not.

I think there’s no problem unless you can’t opt out of them, automatic updates are convenient for a lot of people like me, who forgets to check for updates to things

I don’t like them. Too unpredictable.

If corporations weren’t evil, then yes automatic updates would be fine, but should still be optional

I am fine with bug fixes and maybe feature additions. This is the main reason I usually leave automatic updates on for things.

I am not fine with drastic changes that rearrange the UI or remove functionality that once existed. Or, in the case of some video games, completely changing the game from what I bought into a different game I didn’t ask for.

They are good. Users don’t update on their own.

I am a Linux user and I love automatic updates, personally? I don’t run anything particularly important but I’ve been using Linux for serverboxes and low end laptops for over a decade, and more recently switch full-time to desktop Linux and as of yet I have never had an update break any of my systems. I use a long-term service release, so there tends to be a lot of testing, and often packages being rolled out piecemeal to make sure there aren’t issues with them.

But of course, no one is taking away control of my system from me with Linux automatic updates.

EDIT: Also, since Macs are all the exact same hardware, automatic updates on macOS are a lot less dicey since all hardware configs are exactly the same.

It depends on the software. “Digital authorization” is crazy talk, if you mean it literally. Security updates are good things. Updates that just round the corners of an icon are not needed.

As long as there is a way to opt out, I am for automatic updates. It makes it easier. less hassle on my part, and the everyday person generally wouldn’t update anyway.

Being said, I do think it should be mandatory that the operating system provider supplies a way to have a rollback if an update fails, and I also think that if an update is done that prevents the actual boot of the system, It should be able to detect that and roll itself back. That honestly is the only thing that I really really liked about Windows is while it forced your updates on you. If the update failed to do something, it would catch it, roll it back, and it would be like nothing happened. It wouldn’t stop it from trying to install that same update again, but it at least wouldn’t leave you with an unbootable system.

I don’t like being forced to update. If my system is running fine, has been running fine and will run fine by my use, I don’t see a need to update.

Can’t stand them, they break things. If we want that feature, we’ll download it.

It’s a good assumption that the average person will not care about updates, and in fact, probably would not even know if and when an update is occurring. For that reason, it’s good policy for auto-updates to be default behavior. However, there must always be an ability to opt out indefinitely