Unironically, I am in control of when and if any update happens on my Mac.
Also unironically, the described bug has not happened as a result of an upgrade, it was not forced on any user and definitely was not affecting the whole desktop.
From the articles you linked:
"The images get corrupted on copies to the USB attached external drive. "
"However, as Bombich notes, ordinary APFS volumes like SSD startup disks are not affected by the problem described above, so the vast majority of users won't be affected by it – the flaw is most applicable when making backups to network volumes. "
I am not sure you have read the original article and the two articles you linked, otherwise it would have been obvious that these are not the same by volume and severity.
> it would have been obvious that these are not the same by volume and severity.
If users don't have backups, any unintended data loss caused by an operating system bug is bad because it can be difficult or impossible to recover the affected data. Would you not agree?
You may not have been affected by the two bugs I described above, but some people would have been (more so with the image corruption bug).
> the described bug has not happened as a result of an upgrade, it was not forced on any user and definitely was not affecting the whole desktop.
If you go back further in time, there actually was a bug that resulted in data loss during an OS X upgrade.
Oxford Semiconductor has issued a statement with regard to the emerging Panther and FireWire data-loss debacle.
The company says: "Oxford Semiconductor has been investigating reports that some FireWire 800 drives have lost data after an upgrade to the Mac OS X 10.3 Panther operating system is installed (released late October).
"Currently we believe this issue relates to a change in the way Panther uses FireWire that affected version 1.02 of the OXUF922 driver software. A new version, 1.05 was issued by Oxford Semiconductor to the manufacturers of external drive products in early September."
As Macworld UK first reported yesterday, users installing Panther while having an external FireWire drive connected to their Mac have seen data loss; similarly, users with FireWire drives connected to their systems have seen data loss once they reboot Panther. At this stage, it appears that the problem is confined to FireWire 800 drives.
In 2001 there was also a bug in iTunes 2 that caused an entire hard drive partition to be deleted if the volume label was prefixed with a space.
Some Macintosh users who rushed to download the latest version of iTunes – Apple's popular digital-music player – were singing a song of woe on Friday. A bug in the installation procedure caused the application to completely delete their computers' hard drives.
The bug seems to have affected computers with a very specific configuration: people running Mac OS X who had "partitioned" big hard drives into several smaller ones, and who'd typed a space at the beginning of the drive name.
For example, if a Mac had a drive named " music" instead of "music," it might have been deleted by iTunes.
Tom Fisher, a computer repair technician who lost about 100 gigabytes of information during the installation, said that people often include a space in the drive name to ensure it shows up at the top of the list when they examine their drives.
According to Mac experts who examined the code of the buggy iTunes installer, the problem arose from a very tiny programming mistake – a forgotten quote mark.
Linux (specifically ubuntu in my case) also suffers from somewhat similar problems. Every time I update graphic drivers it's a diceroll on whether it will reboot into a black screen.
Sometimes it's recoverable from blindly pasting god-knows-what from stackoverflow. Most of the time I just have to do a complete reinstall.
(I guess it's not a complete brick on update because I have never suffered data loss, but it's similarly infuriating)
That seems like either a Ubuntu misconfiguration or buggy drivers when interacting with your hardware, but I certainly wouldn't say it's a "Linux" thing, may be a disto thing, Ubuntu's not known for caring much about the desktop these days. I have been using Linux successfully for more than a decade without such issues, which does not mean it didn't happen to you, but it does mean it's anecdotal. I am on a rolling-release disto, which updates much more frequently than Ubuntu does and yet, I've been able to continually upgrade a single install for the past 3 years without issue.
It's also nowhere near as bad as actually loosing data, as you mentioned.
I have also been using linux for over a decade and I still can't recommend it to any non-developers friends unless their hardware build is extremely common.
I am currently running two nvidia gtx 1080 SLI and multiple 4k monitors. Even for just installing the OS, I need to physically remove both graphic cards and use a smaller monitor first. This physically laborious workaround just to reinstall the damn thing is what amplified my rage when it decided to break on autoupdate.
Regardless of OS it's always a good idea to have backups of your important data.
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2018/02/19/apfs-bug-macos-data-los...
[2] https://www.iezzi.ch/leopard-1051-massive-data-loss-bug/