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On my Windows 10 install, Windows Update uses 100% of one core to do whatever it's doing. Once it starts, it seems to spin away indefinitely. Some searching shows that it's not just me that's affected by this. I've also noticed high resource usage from Windows Update on a family-member's laptop (Windows 7 I think). I can understand people disabling Windows Update for performance reasons. It seems to be very buggy and offers few visible improvements to the user. Compare with "apt-get upgrade", which seems to use very few resources, provides visibility on what it's doing and usually takes less than a few minutes to complete.

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Yesterday, I "fixed" a two-year-old Windows 10 notebook computer. It's a cheaper model with one physical CPU core. As far as I could tell, there was no actual malware on it, just Windows and some terrible antivirus package that came with the machine. It hadn't been used all that heavily. Nonetheless, it took 15 minutes to boot and another 15 to present a usable desktop. Even with the AV disabled, the system was still basically unusable. I fixed it by installing Arch with XFCE. (It's in my household, so I'm not worried about the perils of nontechnical users failing to maintain the install.)

I'm disgusted by this situation. This was supposed to be a simple email-checker. But without anybody making any serious mistakes in its administration, (terrible AV software notwithstanding) it had degraded to the point of uselessness in two years and was headed for the dumpster. (There was still plenty of space on the hard disk, and as I said, no evidence of malware.) I could only conclude that the computer was behaving exactly as it was designed to. Under Linux, this computer remains perfectly suitable for its purpose. It's quite responsive even when running a modern web browser, and I have a whole separate rant about how insane web browsers have become.

At any rate, it's quite sensible that people don't apply updates, when updates literally make the computer impossible to use. This being Windows 10, there was no avoiding updates, but I can see why Windows 7 users wouldn't bother with them.

Edit: punctuation

There is a common problem with windows xp and windows 7 failing to update and the process hangs consuming one core completely. Quite a bit of googling/duckduckgo usually fixes it, it's some updates that you need to download and install manually, seems a bit random which ones are needed each time but I have a collection saved for future use. :-)

After doing this I can update windows normally again. Try these for starters: kb3102810, kb3138612, kb3172605

Thanks! I'll give those a try.

I've heard of this problem too --- and it's interesting to ponder what the economic effects of this constant increase in power usage would be, vs. the "damages/costs" of WCry or similar malware outbreaks. Having a significant portion of the world's computers effectively wasting power can't be cheap...

The fact that Windows can't seem to have a sane system update facility continues to boggle me, especially considering that system-wide updates are comparably quite painless on just about every modern Linux distro (aside from the SAG Trifecta and some other oddballs) and have been for nearly multiple decades now.

But apt-get can get in pretty bad (almost unrecoverable) states concerning dependencies. The only OS that has updates down to perfection is macOS, sadly.

>The only OS that has updates down to perfection is macOS, sadly.

Really? Update downloads restart once in a while for no apparent reason. Also, installing Xcode after already having the command line tools messed up everything for me last week.

Unless you use non supported 3rd party repositories, it never happens. Like never, ever. With snaps on the rise, people will probably not use ppa anymore unless they are tech saavy enough to take care of any (rare) problem.

>Unless you use non supported 3rd party repositories

Or you mix and match releases. I usually keep Sid sources enabled, so that I can quickly build a newer version of this or that package if necessary; 90% of the time this works flawlessly, but when it comes to complex stuff like python, the dependency graph can get a bit borked if I'm not careful. (Yeah yeah, not supported, but as I said most of the times it works just fine.)

Whereas Windows Update just screws up periodically on its own. Sometimes it sits at 0% for hours then BANG! 60 updates installed, please reboot. Once I had 100+ updates to apply and I couldn't see any progress, so I killed the wusua service and observed the download folder immediately filling up with packages, which clearly Windows was keeping somewhere else while lying about download progress. Then there are the times when it just refuses to install this or that update and doesn't tell you why...

I'm glad to hear I'm not the only person who's shot themselves in the foot by following apt-gets recommendations

> The only OS that has updates down to perfection is macOS, sadly.

Yeah.... I like the huge downloads and the regular prompts for my apple account password when installing an update best.

Yeah, I've done that, by installing bad debs :(

But sometimes, the broken packages error is illusory. Just a few days ago, I was installing some old thing on Debian jessie, and got that it depended on openssl (0.9.8). But apt wasn't going to install that. So I get that jessie has openssl (1.0.1). Hopeless? No. It turns out that both versions can actually coexist.

This isn't a problem with snaps (https://snapcraft.io), which bundle their dependencies. They're also transactional: if the update fails it just rolls back to the last known-good state.

"The only OS that has updates down to perfection is macOS, sadly."

Even if that was true, it is valid only for system packages. Updating any other application means one of the three things:

    1. Manual updates (and don't get me started on uninstalling).
    2. Brew (which can be a hell of it's own kind).
    3. Apple Store (a.k.e. the walled garden).

I'll rather stick with apt, thank you very much.

For completeness' sake, there's also MacPorts (and Fink, but I don't know anyone who's actually used it).

MacPorts is also hell for various reasons (not the least of which being the effectively-nonexistent integration with the rest of macOS, keeping its own little silo of an OS that gets huge if you install even relatively-simple graphical applications).

1. What? Almost every app uses Sparkle for seamless updates. And macOS has been lauded for a long time as having the simplest install and uninstall process. Drag into /Applications = installed, drag to trashcan = uninstalled. Snaps/Flatpaks will finally bring that to Linux

2. Again, what? Brew is dead-simple. `brew install whatever` and `brew remove whatever` work like butter.

3. Triple what. Sandboxed apps that cleanly update, with a gatekeeper that makes sure no trash comes through? And I can manually sideload stuff if I absolutely need to? Hell yes.

I have a pretty strong feeling you're a Linux elitist, probably running Arch. All the stuff you point out about macOS is plain wrong, and you'd know within a day of using.

And I have a pretty strong feeling that you are a Mac fanboi, jumping to a conclusion despite hints against it, simply because someone criticised your religi^H^H^H operating system of choice. ;-)

1. Oh yes, Mac has the easiest installation process. Deinstallation, not so much -- yes, you can draw your app to trashcan, but that leaves bunch of data files, configurations (depending on the app) etc on the disk. That is the reason for existence of a number of uninstallation utilities like AppCleaner or AppDelete (my tool of choice). And while Sparkle is useful, it is a third-party effort and not aprt of the OS.

2. Oh yes, brew is simple, there is no doubt about that. Except when a package becomes corrupted (e.g. while upgrading, or when there are missing dependencies, or when you accidentally install the same thing in two different ways), in which case it becomes a nightmare to untangle.

3. Oh yes, the gatekeeper is very useful -- unless you disagree with it about what represents "trash". And honestly, my strong belief is that Apple is going to restrict the other ways to install apps in favour of the Apple Store, moving towards a "desktop iOS"; which is perfectly fine if you just want to use certain apps, but isn't if you're a software developer building anything other than MacOS or iOS apps.

Edit: Just to clarify, I am giving my own opinion and pain points which have been turning me away from the Mac for quite a long time (and it's only getting worse). It is not my intention to force my opinion to anyone else or to pronounce Mac the worst and Linux (or anything else) the best choice. It's simply the case that each OS has it's own realities, and some are better fit for some purposes, and others for others.

Even apt-get at its worst is better than Windows Update at its best, though. I reckon that to be closer to the GP's point.

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