80% Install Failures, No Answer From Support: A Major Release Gamble
The upgrade that breaks more than it fixes
A few bugs are one thing, and something that feels fundamentally unstable is another. When someone says they’re seeing an 80% failure rate on installs, that line gets crossed fast. This is a pattern rather than one bad server or a misconfigured environment: updates fail, fresh installs fail, and even after two weeks of working with support, there’s still no resolution.
A situation like that slows you down and also makes you question whether upgrading at all was the right move. When the install itself isn’t reliable, everything that comes after feels like a risk.
The crowd reaction: “yeah… it’s not just you”
What’s striking is how quickly others pile on, mostly with recognition rather than solutions.
“Same boat,” one person says, juggling a dozen installs and already overwhelmed by the number of issues. Another doesn’t sugarcoat it: too many people are complaining right now.
That’s when a problem stops being isolated and becomes shared experience, and shared experience changes how people behave. Instead of troubleshooting harder, they start hesitating, pausing rollouts, questioning timelines, and looking for reasons to wait instead of reasons to proceed.
The workarounds that feel like guesses
Then come the fixes, or at least attempts at fixes. Someone suggests tweaking Windows service startup timeouts through the registry. Another shares a script that bumps ServicesPipeTimeout just to get services to start reliably.
Sometimes it works. It still doesn’t feel like a real solution; it feels like poking at the system until it behaves. Even the people using these fixes admit it. “Still riddled with issues,” one says, clearly not convinced the problem is actually solved.
Troubleshooting gets you past the error, while stabilizing gives you confidence, and right now confidence is missing.
When fixes create more questions
The deeper you go, the stranger it gets. Some people say the issue disappears on newer hardware but not on older systems, even when everything else is identical. Others point to PostgreSQL tweaks. Some mention API services failing to start, and others report backup services hanging after just a few launches.
There’s no single root cause, only fragments of explanations that don’t fully connect. That’s what makes this dangerous. When problems don’t have a clear pattern, you can’t predict them, you can’t standardize a fix, and you can’t confidently roll out at scale.
The performance problem nobody expected
Even when installs succeed, the story doesn’t improve much. “Very sluggish compared to 12,” one user notes, almost casually. Another regrets upgrading entirely after dealing with service hangs and broken features like “Copy To” not even activating.
This is where frustration compounds. A new version that is hard to install but runs better once it’s up is tolerable. One that feels worse across the board is a different story, because now you’re questioning the upgrade itself on top of fixing installation issues.
The old rule that keeps coming back
At some point, someone drops the line that every experienced admin has heard before: “Wait a few months after a major release.”
It sounds almost cliché, but in moments like this it starts feeling like survival instinct more than advice. Early adopters take the hit, finding bugs, testing edge cases, and dealing with instability. Everyone else watches, waits, and decides for themselves whether it’s worth the risk. Right now, a lot of people are choosing to wait.
Three different reactions to the same situation
People respond to the same chaos in different ways.
One group pushes forward anyway. They troubleshoot, apply registry tweaks, and test hardware differences, doing whatever it takes to make it work.
Another group freezes upgrades entirely. “Sticking on 12,” one person says, out of caution rather than laziness.
A third group feels burned. Regret sets in, confidence drops, and the upgrade becomes something they wish they hadn’t touched at all.
None of these reactions are wrong. They’re shaped by how much instability each team is willing, or able, to absorb.
Bugs are the smaller problem
Bugs happen, and every major release has them, so that part is no surprise. What stands out here is the combination of issues: high failure rates, inconsistent fixes, performance concerns, and support that hasn’t delivered answers quickly enough. The accumulation of problems is what erodes trust.
A takeaway that feels a bit too familiar
The pattern in all of this isn’t unique to one product. Major releases promise improvements, new features, and better performance, but they also introduce unknowns: dependencies, edge cases, and interactions that only show up in real-world environments. When those unknowns stack up, even something as routine as an install starts to feel like a gamble.
Version 13 will probably stabilize eventually. The simpler and harder question is whether you want to be the one finding out where it breaks.