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Comment by pjerem | Hacker News Reader

On Ubuntu, when this message is shown, most of the updates except the kernel are already applied so you are mostly pretty secure. And you can choose when that will happen. And it’s just a normal reboot.

On Windows, IIRC, you are blocked during the whole update process which can take several minutes.

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Ubuntu's stable builds do not upgrade kernel and its close vicinity every week, AFAIK. I have a couple of servers with unattended updates enabled, and they do not greet me with "System Reboot Required" banner every week, and if that's required, the server is back with all services running <30 seconds.

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.

Weird. My windows PC updates like your Linux machine. How often do update vs your parents? Maybe they had some larger “half” releases pending (I.e. closer to a major macOS release, which also take time)

The machine is on standby all the time. So it updates whenever it wants. In this occasion the machine was turned off for a couple of months, but the updates were not the "half release" updates. The list was .NET runtime, intel graphics drivers, some dynamic update support and the like. I was watching the machine all the time.

Funnily, dynamic updates support installation failed after all the kicking and screaming, and I didn't try. Maybe I'll look into it later.

Upgrade that PC's OS drive to a NVMe. Seriously. We manage thousands of PCs at work and ever since we got laptop models with NVMe drives, updates are a breeze with 6 ± 3 minutes of total downtime.

Oh, OK. It's a PEBKAC case, then, my bad.

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.

I have no idea how you got to "Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair" given that I literally blamed the slow OS disk drive inside the computer based on thousands of data points on my end.

Hey, no, I don’t dispute your data points at all. A bog standard NVMe can handle ~1MIOPS these days, and it’s above and beyond what SATA SSDs can provide.

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.

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