BTW how is it that Windows 10 still needs more reboot to update any parts of itself, than a regular Linux distro? The update cycle on my Windows 10 machine is maddening compared to my Linux workstation.
Linux can install most updates without rebooting but updated components won't be used until they are restarted. E.g. if Firefox is updated while it is running, Firefox will need to be restarted (indeed, FF will force you to restart it) for the new version to come into effect. When low-level components (e.g. kernel, libc) are updated, the system must be restarted for these updates to take effect.
Running Linux without periodically rebooting after installing updates is little different from never installing updates at all.
If you have a company in mind, then whatever they do is their problem. This is called risk management. Security takes a back seat until it does not when there are 400 GB of sensitive data that were stolen and are at sale for 10 M€.
If that company's computers then participate to criminal activities the company should be successfully sued for that. Together with the grandma and families that did not reboot when asked.
> BTW how is it that Windows 10 still needs more reboot to update any parts of itself, than a regular Linux distro? The update cycle on my Windows 10 machine is maddening compared to my Linux workstation.
That's another point. A good point. Every OS has its crapiness, even my beloved Linux that I extensively use since 1994 and still hope, one day, to have on desktop at the quality level of Windows 10.
Windows has a setting for “active hours” during which it will avoid reboots. It asks about those hours during the initial setup, including a somewhat sane default (0800-1700 IIRC). So reboots during working hours are minimized.
If I am in the middle of something, and put my laptop to sleep at the end of the day, I absolutely do not expect it to wake up in the small hours, reboot itself, and lose all my work.
The "active hours" is irrelevant. Unconfirmed reboots at any time are completely unacceptable. Look at how MacOS does it. Or Linux updates. Let the user have some modicum of control in scheduling them at their convenience. It's their computer. It's their work. It's their schedule. Computers are supposed to empower us, not enslave us, but it seems increasingly the other way around. They give others control over us.
I might be running long-running computations which take several days. I might be performing time-critical data acquisition which is going to run overnight. Hell, I might even just put the system to sleep expecting to pick up in the morning where I left off.
The computer's sole purpose is to perform tasks for me. The software vendors desire to push updates is of lower priority than my own needs. Deciding that it is acceptable to reboot the computer without any acknowledgement or permission from myself is completely and utterly unacceptable. You are correct that applications could be written to restore their state after a reboot. But it's of critical importance to note that:
1) most applications are not written to do this
2) not all application state is restorable
so to do this on Windows is guaranteed to break important workflows. People use Windows for actual important work, and this unscheduled reboot nonsense makes it impossible to rely on the system to function reliably.
Also; Windows reboots so much probably because of legacy. It was never designed to live reload important components. Why Word needs a reboot, I’ll never know.