Good to know the team works hard on improvement, but constantly needing to install the newest version every couple of days or every week or so gets annoying after a while. Or am I missing something?
Needing? Why do you need to do that?
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Seriously, though, why no auto-update?
Because it is not a very good idea. Unity updates bring changes that may break your project, or it may need to reimport you textures or something which can take the whole day, so when those things happen should be under my control.
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Oh, I get it, should the project break under the current version, than you can still start it under a different version, because the actual editor doesn’t get overwritten.
But… isn’t a newer version additional disk space?
Yes. But same applies to every you project and associated with it files. You can uninstall not needed Unity versions, hence freeing some storage space. So that should be least of your concerns.
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Very few professionals migrate to newer releases as soon as they’re available. Upgrading is a time consuming process because you have to determine if anything broke between releases. Time spent doing this scales with the project. If I was forced to do this every time an update comes out (which is generally every two weeks) I’d switch game engines.
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Agreed.
I was actually working off of 5.6 until a month or two ago.
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Yikes. No way. That would be chaos.
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If Unity ever implemented automatic client updates I would straight up eat John Riccitiello
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Combined with the low usage of versioning in the unity community I think it would be a complete disaster. 
even we that are on version control don’t want it to auto update.
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Good god no, a great portion of my development time is already spent circumventing various parts of unity engine I dont want / need, I dont want it to start imposing editor updates on me too!
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You should hang around a while. Watch for the big updates, and the screams of “An update broke my project and I didn’t back it up and now I can’t revert”.
(Yes I know, we teach regular backups to two year olds, but some devs are stubborn).
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Dont do backups, use a versioning tool like git. That means backup PLUS proper versioning
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From a QA perspective, whenever something changes in your project everything it touches needs to be retested. Unity itself touches virtually everything in your project, so if you’re doing proper testing a new Unity version should mean you’re retesting everything. That could be weeks or even months for larger projects. Kicking that off every time Unity releases a new version is neither desirable nor practical.
So what you do is pay attention to release notes for newer versions. Was something fixed that impacts my project? How does some new feature help (or hinder) my project? Make your decision carefully.
For example, my main project is on 2018.2.21. My project has lots of very large terrains, and a workflow for importing them which took a while to get right. 2018.3.0 and later includes an improved terrain system, but the risk for me is too high to move to at this time even though there are other improvements I’d like to pick up.
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Version control is no substitute for a robust backup system.
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Its included in if not all than most hosted solutions. Plus git is distributed so you get backups per say.
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And how do you version media, like textures, videos, sounds and models data, without backup?
git LFS
“Per se” is not good enough when it comes to backups. I do repo backups every Friday for a reason.
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