> ... perhaps if were to actually get serious about doing small/incremental updates all the time, we'd get better at actually doing them without incident.
That would require more developers to actually give a fuck about the user experience not breaking from release to release.
I simply expect that doing an upgrade of the system (as opposed to grabbing the latest version of applications and libraries) is going to totally destroy my box and I'll spend the day recovering, because that's happened to me multiple times, from multiple OS vendors.
Hopefully (and I realize that this is somewhat wishful thinking), more users doing haphazard upgrades and complaining about them not working would be feedback into the whole cycle.
(I'm not very well placed in the software cycle to actually start this feedback loop, but one can wish, right?)
Given the general quality of response to user reports in free software ("The source is there, fix it yourself", "WONTFIX", "That's a feature", "you're doing it wrong."
That would require more developers to actually give a fuck about the user experience not breaking from release to release.