My #1 complaint with Bisq, which is otherwise extremely close to what I both wanted and expected, is the absolute chore of being forced to manually update it constantly.
Basically every time I start up Bisq, it tells me that there is a new update and that I’m not allowed to trade/use it before I perform this update. Many times, this has caused that the great offer I detected by talking to the API was gone by the time I finally got Bisq up and running again.
Currently, Bisq requires you to manually verify that you want to download the new update, but it doesn’t stop there; you then have to locate the new installer and run it manually, being presented a GUI as if it were the first time you installed Bisq.
Bisq shares this behaviour with a lot of other software, which I never or very rarely update as a result. This is obviously horrible for security, but after being subjected to these rude “update mechanisms” for 20+ years, I’ve gone numb in my mind and just no longer have the energy or patience to deal with it.
Since Bisq is already installed, nothing stops it from launching the update it has just downloaded and verified automatically, with a flag such as “/silent-update-only” or something along those lines, which skips the whole GUI and just restarts Bisq instantly into the new version.
(In fact, even asking if I want to download the new update at all seems pointless since I can’t keep using Bisq with the older version anyway, but I understand if that part might be psychologically important for the user to feel as if they are in some kind of control, so I don’t expect you to get rid of that step.)
Please don’t tell me to use “Chocolately” or some other third-party “package manager”; I don’t trust those one bit (for good reasons) and already have to muster up all my courage to trust Bisq running on my “host”/main OS.
Please also don’t think I’m talking about “Windows Store”; I don’t want anything to do with that.
All I’m asking is for you, the Bisq developers, to understand that it doesn’t make sense to have every update pretend as if Bisq is just being installed for the first time. It may sound “lazy”, but it really does build up in one’s mind to become a massive ordeal over time.
Besides this just being a personal complaint, I’m very seriously suggesting that this “forced manual labor” update system will doubtlessly hold back Bisq’s ability to grow. Whether justified or not, I feel downright insulted every time this happens, whether by Bisq or any other program. My natural instinct is just to immediately “X it down” and do something else rather than sitting there and going through another “update installer” session. I’m certain that a lot of people feel this way as well, and, given that so very little is required by the developers to achieve this, it’s almost as if they want it this way… for some reason.
Note that I’m not talking about some “always-running update daemon”; I’m simply saying that Bisq’s built-in updater, which activates when you run Bisq, should not bother the user with a separate “update installer”; it should be silently done automatically once they have clicked “Yes, I want it to update”. It should also have a little checkbox saying: “Never ask before updating in the future”, which skips even that step.
Please implement this and you’ll at least make this Bisq user way less annoyed and more likely to trade with Bisq. Given that you managed to create a whole advanced decentralized trading software, containing all kinds of highly complicated stuff, it’s very strange that you haven’t done this, which is probably just a couple of lines of code.
If you all use non-Windows and hate Windows and want to discourage people from using it, I understand that in several ways, but please understand that this will not make people switch to Linux, but rather make them switch from using Bisq if anything.