I used to be that old, I was already a professional when I programmed my "Pocket" Computers, to use in place of hand calculators and on-board mechanical adders, as a portable device to handle cargo ships.
IBM hadn't released PC's anyway, and laptops were a long way off. It was over a dozen years before laptops started being used a bit, but there I was, the only one to be seen carrying a portable computer up the gangway with all the options including the 4-color mini printer-plotter and RS-232 interface before they started calling them COM ports. In the full TRS-80 carrying case I guess it gave the first image of what was to come with laptops eventually.
It would be cool if they still had portable plotters now, since we expected all kinds of technology to become more common once the 21st century got here. I'm probably just not up to date, they're probably everywhere and I just don't know about it.
Anyway, I update my main Linux systems manually every month, so it doesn't bug me but I have to keep up with it.
The occasional Windows Pro PCs are not allowed on the web every day but they autoupdate as a mainstream user. Maybe you would like the "elusive" LTSC versions if you stick with Windows so you can choose to avoid updates entirely, but this soon leaves you insecure if you don't at least enable security updates, you need that much auto or manually when you do go on the web.
For scientific instruments that only support Windows Pro, I highly tweak it so that nothing ever interrupts that primary purpose, and simply stay off the web forever. On one instrument the 2016 version of Windows 10 32-bit will be going strong until there is no functional hardware any more within reason. Spectrometer readings work the same year after year with no upsets or surprises.
Unlike one of the units at the time where IT was still responsible, it eventually auto updated from W7 to W10 when it really got ridiculously forceful. I told them they might not want to let that happen :(
Well that locked up one of the robotic titrators due to completely misguided permissions and there was no way to recover without physically dismantling the unit while full of chemicals, before the internal memory chip could be removed and returned to previous backward-compatible functionality.
So after all these years I do think "upgrades" definitely have their upsides and downsides, and people should still be able to choose as well as they could during higher-quality times.
> I am getting to the point with my Mac computers (Studio Ultra and MacBook Pro) that I dread when OS updates are on the horizon.
You don't have to update to the upcoming major macOS version. You can just stay on the current one for as long as it's supported (usually a few years, Monterey is still getting regular updates).
I like Manjaro XFCE, it's rolling updates so it's as packages come out you can update to the newest (it pulls latest from github, but has other repos)
if you want oldschool oldschool, check out antiX linux, MX Linux is based on AntiX but looks semi-better, they're based on Debian. Remember though, debian is like 5 package versions behind, because that's what they do with their auditing for stability.
MX Linux has a UI (https://mxlinux.org/) - AntiX is popup menus for settings.
Manjaro XFCE is a complete OS for me without all the bells and whistles of KDE. Based on ARCH.
You're probably wanting MX Linux though. Choose just the security updates and you'll be where you want to be.
Debian is the solution. You can choose to only receive security updates unlike any other OS. And it's supported for many years.
Not only do I dislike updates, aside from a web browser, I don't want my main machine to have network access (and that just to read static webpages and download non-executable files).
The updates and network access are mostly nonsense. The main 'benefit' of the former is to protect my machine from the ramifications of having the network access. The main 'benefit' of the latter is to facilitate downloading the updates.
My main computer is what I use to make things. When the software I use suddenly changes, when I have to worry about random apps connecting arbitrarily to other people's machines... it is more an impediment to my making things than it is an aid.