> shown they don't respect the user when they force shutdown for system updates
Are you familiar with the prior state of things that explicitly motivated this change?
Are you familiar with the prior state of things that explicitly motivated this change?
macOS does the same thing. When I actually sleep, when my laptop's lid is closed. I wake up. My Mac wants a password instead of a fingerprint. It says it has updated the OS when I was snoring. What's the difference?
Every app, every window, everything is the way I left before closing the lid. My computer is updated, rebooted and ready for the day. Like nothing happened.
Linux is the same deal. If the desktop environment is upgraded a logout and login is necessary (and KDE restores session as well as macOS for the last decade, at least), and if I updated the kernel, I reboot. I'm back in 30 seconds, to the exact point that I left.
Only Windows takes 2 hours, 4 reboots, 3 blood sacrifices and countless frustration sounds to upgrade. While saturating the processor and the storage subsystem at the same time, which makes my computer create the same sounds of the said blood sacrifices.
My guess is they don't actually believe they have any competition, and therefore don't care to improve anything that doesn't also improve their bottom line.
the hot patch feature you mentioned is paid
On Windows, IIRC, you are blocked during the whole update process which can take several minutes.
OTOH, I upgraded my parents' PC yesterday, after three months of downtime. It really took at least two hours and four reboots. The machine was screaming and the task manager showed a blue rectangle for CPU load (uninterrupted 100%) and a green one for the disk load (again, uninterrupted 100%) while nothing was usable all the time.
Same process takes <10m in Linux (specifically Debian), and an optional reboot, without any hardware load drama.
Funnily, dynamic updates support installation failed after all the kicking and screaming, and I didn't try. Maybe I'll look into it later.
I'd rather teach my parents to use Linux instead. Updates will be a breeze with 3±2 minutes of total background work without any interruption and 30 seconds of occasional downtime.
What I’m against is tolerating a bad OS design with more capable hardware and allowing Microsoft to worsen the experience. This is a pattern of Microsoft since forever.
Oh, that particular PC has no NVMe support anyway. I don’t know why that M.2 port is SATA only.
Especially when every other major OS can handle this more gracefully. I can version upgrade a fully loaded Debian installation in less than 6 minutes, reboot included, on a SATA disk, for example.
Also, while tangential, Windows providing the worst update experience, and calling Linux a major, mainstream OS superior in some ways feels unbelievable when I look back a decade.
In fact, they already figured out hotpatching and will sell it to you for server 2025.
Off topic, but I'm pretty sure that Ubuntu's livepatching is just kpatch under the hood,
No. Which OS is that ? Even to update Office they throw an annoying popup and then another one to start the update and a dark pattern (close button accesible with a hidden scrollbar and no window controls) one to tell you it is finished.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/blog/2025/04/...
Linux only requires rebooting for kernel updates, and with kpatch not even that.
It might still be bad thing for taking away agency. But it was also a massive improvement to society.
I have vague memories as a teenager of running older versions of MSN messenger in compatability mode because after a certain version it was full of ads.
Android phone software is also very good at this now, I still hestate to update my pixel because each update somehow makes my phone worse to use.
Masks during covid were a matter of public health.
Regular updates are also a similar matter.
It's not a comparison that bears a response.
Missing Windows updates does not kill anyone.
Plus, installing Windows updates may cause high frustration because "feature" updates are mixed with them and may alter the OS behavior in unexpected and undesired ways. If Microsoft cares so much about security, they should allow people to stay on fixed Windows stable versions that only get security updates without pestering them. Basically, sell LTSC to normal people.
Most users, for better or worse, don't want any update ever, unless they wish for a specific feature. We're at a state where there's only once-in-10-years massive attacks exactly because of mandatory security updates that will be forced on the user if they have no intention to install it ever.
Fedora decided this isn't super stable so they actually went and implemented something similar to Windows updates called Offline updates, where updates are performed after a reboot in a special mode where you can't do anything with your computer while it updates for like 10 minutes, but they give you an option to disable this and do instant updates like described above instead.
I think the most interesting innovation are immutable distros, which handle updates entirely differently. They will build an updated image while the system continues running and make it ready so that next reboot will just boot into the updated image. It avoids the partially-updated-system instability entirely and it also makes reverting a broken update instant and easy because you can just boot into the old image (there's usually at least two images). This exists in Fedora Silverblue (OSTree) and Vanilla OS (ABRoot) and AFAIK Android also followed this update pattern with A/B partitions (although they now iterated on this slightly to squeeze a few extra gigabytes out of storage).
I honestly don't know why Windows still sticks to their antiquated offline update system when better options exist and everyone always complains about the way they do updates and they have billions of dollars at their disposal, but I guess lack of any real competition to Windows in the PC operating system market has led to such stagnation
Windows does do hotpatching, but there's a lot of things that aren't hotpatchable. Do you really think that Windows is like "naw, we could do zero reboot updates, but prefer not to because we are so dominant in the OS space"? This would be an incredible feature for the enterprise. In fact the enterprise version added a bunch of new hotpatch support just last year, but still requires quarterly updates and only does security updates. You really think that they did all that, but decided to not do the rest because they're comfy?
Again, I haven't seen Linux or Mac solve the problem fully either, nor iPhone or Android. AFAIK even every cloud provider has to do a reboot. Would Google or Amazon or Oracle have figured this out if it was so easy? How is it that there is no actual software engineer in industry that knows how to do this, but everyone on message forums seems to? Why don't these companies just hire people from message forums?
> Do you really think that Windows is like "naw, we could do zero reboot updates, but prefer not to because we are so dominant in the OS space"?
Microsoft has become complacent with Windows and I think there's no denying that. You need to look no further than the new right-click context menu they thought is acceptable to ship to a billion users. It's lacking half the functionality such as extensions, so they just decided to keep the old one behind "Show more options"? Or maybe no software engineer in the world could solve the infamous context menu 2.0 problem...
No operating system has fully solved every problem with updates, but many of them have solved many problems that Windows still continues to have. Zero reboot updates are probably impossible to do reliably but there are other ways to improve that aren't zero reboot updates. I don't claim to know the ins and outs of Windows and exactly how to implement better updates, but they could surely do better than what they're currently doing.
[1] It reminds me of dermatologists, so hyperfocused on skin cancer that they tell everybody to hide from the sun, completely oblivious to all the harm their advice causes to the rest of our health.
Servers I understand because they're exposed to the Internet at all times. Not PCs
Can't remember a single problem with the described setup and I've been using the internet since dial-up was the only option available.
Getting hacked when you don't have any open ports (thanks to NAT) is and was pretty unlikely - what was more likely is some kind of drive-by exploit in Flash or IE. The biggest problem I experienced with old Windows was general instability in the form of BSODs and driver compatibility problems.
NAT was for fancy-pants with multiple PCs.
The CD-ROM I had was pre-SP2 (so no firewall), and our internet setup was basic modem + switch. No router with “drop invalid state” or fancy things like that.
So, installed Windows and plugged in Ethernet to fetch Windows updates.
2 minutes later, with no user interaction whatsoever, the PC was infected with malware.
Gates, is that you ? They have telemetry in PCs those days, you know. /s
And, for reference, updates are not forcefully installed on Windows Server.
Well, forcefully restarting a server without asking its owner does sound like a bad idea. And disrespecting the users in that way when the competitor OS for servers is free, has significant market share and is known for letting the user to what they want and getting out of the way should probably also be avoided from a market perspective.