Unity Version Quality Voting

Would it be possible to add Up/Down Voting to every Unity build that is released. This would allow users and Unity developers to get a feel of what versions the community thinks is good. It would make it much easier for users to chose a stable version.

I've noticed that some versions of Unity are way better than others. I'm currently sticking to 2019.4.5f1 and it's all in all a pretty good experience. I found a bug that I (falsely) attributed to Unity. Hoping this would be fixed in a new version I ended up trying quite a few builds. To my dismay I noticed some usability problems with newer version, e.g. it takes ages to stop a running build, or it would simply have to be aborted in the task manager. This does occasionally happen with 2019.4.5f1, but not nearly as frequently. I might be the only one with this issue, but I was thinking it would be nice to know.

 

The problem is how do you persuade to vote those, who has no problems? Do you want to annoy everyone in the engine? Or you want a super-biased opinion from those, who visit the forums and probably has some problems in the begin with?

 

No, I don't think this is a good idea, sorry. The community's opinion can vary wildly from fact.

The correct way to do this is download a new version and open it with a copy of the project, and test it properly. This is how it is done in software development. Also version control.

Your project is too important to leave to vague internet opinion.

 

I for one would upvote 2019.4.5 and downvote the version I've tried and had issues with. It's just additional information. I worked with NWjs before and got recommendations for the most stable builds. Sometimes new features just cause issues, nothing wrong with that. But I don't really want to deal with them if I am not looking for the newest features. No way I can download and test every version, that just takes way too much time and bandwidth. I downloaded 3 newer versions and they all did not work as well for me, so I'm sticking to the one that works for now. I just want the most stable I can get.

I guess a statistic of which version is being used how often would also work, but that might inflict on some kind of privacy.

 

Yea I wouldn't trust annoyed strangers on the internet either.

Also it really wouldn't help you much to know that some people had specific issues, because you could still be completely unaffected. I also highly doubt that there's a scientific way to prove that one version is better or worse than others. The number of bugs would need to be ranked by severity and other qualitative factors.

It also doesn't help to say "well everything from 2020 upwards is bad, so I'm going to stick with legacy", because that means you can't support digital stores and new hardware really soon. You're forced to stay up to date by the market, so the only reasonable thing to do is pick the most recent stable version of a software and then report bugs, make use of customer support, etc. For Unity that would be LTS. You might still find a bug in 2020 LTS that wasn't in 2019, but with the LTS version you can report it and get it fixed in a couple of weeks or months, whereas legacy will slowly fade out and stop working.

 

Yeah, it's not really that bad or hard to keep up with patch notes and do a bit of testing, after a while it's second nature and you're a much more clued in dev about all things Unity.