[charcoal23]

I'd agree with your perceived trend. Ubuntu has the right idea with the LTS releases. Microsoft had the right idea with the LTSB, but ruined it by making it limited to enterprise customers.

I hope Apple and Microsoft will start to realize many of their customers see the OS as the layer for getting things done, and not as an end to itself. Annual, or semi-annual, feature updates are not fun, waste time with a slow install, and the features are frequently unwanted. And with the lack of QA in both companies, each major update brings a whole host of new bugs.

[vlunkr]

This does make Linux appealing to me at the moment. If a major distro changes something that bothers you, you can count on someone to fork and maintain the old way. There are trade-offs of course, but it's possible to keep you system just the way you like for a long time while still getting updates where they are important.