No, they don’t “owe” us anything. It would just make sense. The official communication is clear: they want to make NC popular, they are advocating for everybody to transition, they make installing it a breeze. This - by the way, very welcome and valuable - effort is jeopardized by the lack of clear communication in these areas and predictability.
Convincing people to start using a platform, and then pulling the rug is a jerk move, even if it’s for free; and it doesn’t make sense, either.
Incorrect. The 32-bit support drop has been admitted on this very forum to have been a conscious decision years ago. And you yourself designated Projects as deprecated, which is by definition a result of a decision.
I mean, having to go into the trouble of reverting from backups isn’t headache in itself? Especially as opposed to being informed in advance that what trouble/change might be expected from an update, making the user able to make an informed decision, instead of damage control.
I usually actually do that, but on an empty test instance I had no chance to notice that the Projects feature disappeared. One can’t expect users to test every single system feature before every version upgrade, just to make sure the devs didn’t decide to pull something quietly.
I think I’m fully justified in running my family NC on a NAS appliance, which happpens to be 32-bit, but otherwise still perfectly suitable to serve the workload. I have a suspicion that a lot of people use NC this way.
And I’m sure that not running a business, just a family instance makes my time much less valuable, but thanks, no thanks.
Seriously argue with a language idiom?
It’s not that it’s mission critical. It’s just that the lack of useful communication (among the very loud marketing communication which is abundant) causes unnecessary problems and surprises, which is a perfect way to alienate users, which the team spends so much effort attracting with marketing. It’s not that it’s owed to anyone, it’s just shooting yourself in the foot, and doesn’t make sense.
I’m sure using a hosted provider, where I don’t even have control over version upgrade schedule, would solve the problem of certain, sometimes heavily used features just disappearing overnight. Oh wait…