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Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

Presumably this happened because of how rarely the OP boots Windows. It was likely feverishly applying months of security hotpatches to itself in the background, trying to outpace the user clicking on an email attachment.

People who use Windows primarily, and leave it running and idle when they’re not using it (even just asleep is fine, for a laptop), don’t have this problem; Windows does this stuff incrementally, and mostly when you’re not using it.

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I think he's mostly ranting, and his conclusions on the death of Windows are conclusions on that ranting -- i.e. nonsense -- however! Saying the reason Windows does this is X, doesn't excuse anything. It's insane that this is how it works.

Not really, the old way was that updating was an event and a task within itself, and your mom doesn't want to sit there waiting for updates to complete to write a letter or browse facebook. Silent, backgrounded incremental updates are the better fit for 99% of users.

Full disclosure: I use linux as my daily driver and don't have a windows installation.

But it's not the old way, at least not for for MacOS (and last time I checked, Linux, which you use?).

Granted, the MacOS version upgrades are indeed _a thing_, and pretty annoying, but that problem still exists even with the incremental upgrades Windows does. There's just no way around certain types of upgrade that touch core components.

> even just asleep is fine, for a laptop

Except that Windows never-ever-ever reliably sleeps. There is always something, some program, some driver, whatever, waking it up from sleep.

Linux isn't better in this regard.

When my devices - mostly ThinkPads of different vintage running Debian plus a 27" iMac running the same - sleep they don't wake up until I want them to so yes, "Linux" is better in this regard. If your device wakes up when it should sleep I'd check if Wake-on-Lan is enabled.

It is now though. I agree that 5 years ago it wasn't ideal, but now the hardware support linux way better than it used to do, and on my dual-boot, i have 1/3rd more battery life with linux when i'm using it.

For the "never really idle" part, i've found a script on github that deactivate and uninstall most of the bloatware windows come with, and it's now way better, so i cannot judge.

I find hibernation to be the best approach. Zero battery drain, my laptop boots in 5 seconds (or negligible time to be concerned about). Just set it up to hibernate when the lid is closed.

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