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Comment by TedDoesntTalk | Hacker News Reader

I use windows 10 for a gaming PC that I turn on once every few weeks. Almost every single time, windows update and defender scan bring disk and CPU usage to their knees. I can’t game until it’s done, sometimes an hour and one or more reboots.

I’ve spent significant time trying to turn these off and allow me to run them manually. No luck. I think I was able to turn one of them off but not the other, don’t recall.

So it might be stable but it’s not usable unless you leave the device powered on 24/7.

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For a while I did the opposite to you. Ran Windows full time with the occasional boot into Linux. Every time I booted in Linux I'd find hundreds of packages were out of date and needed updating. Even a week of not booting in Linux can see a large number of packages needing updates especially on rolling distributions like Arch. Even Debian would have many packages needing updates despite their very conservative package update policies.. I think it just part and parcel of running a modern OS that there are regular updates. When you run it daily it's easy enough to do a few updates every day rather than do a lot of updates all at once. Not a Windows specific thing. Heck, even Apple is not immune. I have a MacBook for work I have not touched since my last day of work in mid December. I bet you When I open it again soon Mac os will nag me to install all the updates that have been released in the last few weeks.

Those packages generally don't "need" updating. I generally go months between updates on Linux systems with 100% uptime the entire time.

The big difference is that in the Linux world, updates are in your control and the other way around. You're free to skip the updates, disable the notification, uninstall the thing that auto-fetches the package list, uninstall the package manager even. You can install a package that will silently install security-critical, or other updates for you. There's an upgrade that can even update the kernel itself while running. Simple updates will tell you to restart, but you don't have to - it's fine to use the machine even if it tells you you better restart.

Updates are frequent in both worlds because the high-speed always-on internet enables and requires it. But while Linux gives you options to deal with this, Microsoft decided to remotely manage your computer instead.

This problem cuts both ways. I have a Ubuntu VM I use occasionally and the last time I allowed it to update it took literal hours and died halfway through and I lacked the expertise to figure out what went wrong.

It still boots so I just ignore the update nags since I don't really use it for much that is important.

But the install is extremely vanilla and I'm a little shocked the update had issues.

I'm primarily a windows user with a couple of linux-based servers. I just went through this very thing, except I ended up spending hours Googling after failed updates to ensure I could jump to latest LTS from two LTS versions behind.

Half way through I cursed myself for not having documented my set up well enough to just wipe and install clean latest LTS image so I wouldn't have to wade through various forum question/answers.

That may be specific to apt or your hardware? Recently I updated a laptop I hadn't touched in a while with pacman and it went through in a few minutes (decompressed update size was around 11GB iirc). Download phase took longer than the install phase.

Are you using a mechanical disk? I can't even remember the last time windows updates or defender made a meaningful impact on my day to day usage. Even after a year of being off line, I anticipate the problem and just leave it sit for an hour and it's ready to reboot to install all the updates. It does indeed take numerous reboots often, as does MacOS, which is imperfect. Though I'll take automatic reboots over cryptic package compiler errors any day.

Yes mechanical disk because i could not get a ssd with 5 year warranty, although they are now available and i have not upgraded yet

The problem with windows updates + windows defender seems to be that they interact synchronously and only use a single thread. Even on my work laptop with an NVMe drive updates bring a single core to 100% for several minutes and it's nowhere near saturating IO bandwidth or IOPS.

I’m curious. I dual boot both windows and Linux and when I switch over to my windows vm I don’t have these issues. Then again I’m running decent hardware and my boot drive is on an nvme drive. Are you running windows on an HDD? I’ve noticed probably since Microsoft dropped all support for Windows 7 that Windows 10 runs horribly on an HDD, but if you swap the HDD for an SSD it’s like a whole new machine.

I get the same problem on a machine with an SSD. The only time I hear the fans is when Windows update is running.

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