No, my scope is far to new to ever have seen the blue-violet-puke colour UI.
So what model are we talking about? Or is this a secret?
I just really dont like their one-touch whatever, with for example the annotated grid (which isnt really good if you have to edit it out of screenshots before you can publish those, as it looks crappy).
The only UI change besides the "old" (blue)/"new" (charcoal) transition 10 years ago was the introduction of "OneTouch" gesture controls with the WaveRunner 8000, so I guess that's what you're getting at. As with the New GUI, OneTouch is a factory-installed SW option which in theory could be removed and would give you the New GUI without the gesture controls. But if you manage to remove the OneTouch key from the scope (which isn't user-accessible) then next time your scope has to go to LeCroy for calibration/repair they'll know you fiddled with the key system and immediately void your warranty and block the scope serial from ever being worked on by them, even if paid for.
Also, the various UIs aren't universally supported, which means switching back to non-gesture UI on a scope that came with OneTouch might get you unworkable options.
As to annotations, these can be switched off by a press of a button so if you don't want them on screenshots why just don't you switch them off (or take the screenshot before annotating the screen)?
Still, i think an archive is always a good idea to have. There can easily be some kind of incompatibility or whatever, especially on older, unsupported systems it can be of great help to see if there is any version that works when the latest one has some well hidden bug.
So how do you know the latest version has a bug if it is well hidden? And if there's a bug you actually experience, why wouldn't you just report it so it can get fixed (which they will do even if it only affects older scopes), in which case LeCroy would give you the necessary software to avoid that bug until it is fixed?
Especially on a system that can be easily up/downgraded and even allows for switching between several sw versions (using a boot manager and several windows installations) as needed.
Which somehow defeats the purpose of a test instrument if you have to use multi-boot to work around bugs. If I were to see one of my engineers spending time on such nonsense instead of just reporting it to the manufacturer and getting it fixed once and for all then he'd be in hot water.
We had this kind of problems with other instruments already, FW update leading to a nearly unuseable instrument and "were working on it, can take a few weeks for new release". Good when you have an old version to go back to, bad when its 2 years old and lacks features you need.
That sounds like something I'd expect from Rigol or Siglent but not from a reputable A-brand like LeCroy or Keysight.
Even worse on most embedded system based machines, with no downgrade ability. Just looking at tektronix here... (old)DPO2k fw update to last version breaks fan control (100% on now), often saves broken files when on max. memory and often fails to trigger. Worked fine on last version before (except for display glitches, which is why we upgraded). Cant downgrade, instrument is basically junk and was sold off.
Yeah, well, that's Tek. There's a reason they're pretty much at the bottom-end of all A-brands, and have been for a very long time (their decline started when analog scopes were no longer a thing). That also includes support.