Comment by chasil
4 months ago
If you have recently endured Windows Update for Patch Tuesday, you know that you are forced to reboot during this process. This activity will deny you "the five 9s," i.e., 99.999% availability in uptime.
If you have recently performed the analog activity on a Linux distribution, which is likely either apt update/upgrade or yum update, you will notice that a reboot is not required. These update approaches cannot alter the running kernel, but ksplice and kernelcare offer either free or low-cost options to address that.
Windows update is enormously painful compared to Linux. There can be no argument of this fact.
> This activity will deny you "the five 9s," i.e., 99.999% availability in uptime.
Which is something 99% of personal computers don’t care about even slightly. These days restarting your machine is a very inconsequential event, your browser can effortlessly reopen all the tabs you had active, macOS will even reopen all the windows for your native apps.
I don’t mean to defend Windows Update, I just think “you have to restart your computer!” is not a particularly good reason to damn it.
Windows update is agony compared to apt/yum.
A complete patch Tuesday session is twenty minutes of reduced performance, followed by a "don't reboot your computer" of unknown time both before and after the reboot.
Anything is better than that, especially when some updates either reboot immediately or kindly give you five minutes to close everything down (was tmux made precisely for Windows update?).
Exposure to apt/yum really makes Windows intolerable, just for this alone.
> especially when some updates either reboot immediately or kindly give you five minutes to close everything down
I have been a Windows user since XP. Never, not even once did Windows decide to reboot without asking first. Never.
The only way this could've have happened is if Windows kept asking you over the span of a week or 2 to restart to apply the updates and you kept postponing it.
Either way, "Hot Patching" will soon be a thing on Windows so restart won't be required every month [1].
[1] https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/micr...
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> Which is something 99% of personal computers don’t care about even slightly
to the point that I know people that still turn their computers off when they are not using them.
Let's get this out of the way first: "the five 9's" is not a requirement for personal computers. That argument therefore is invalid.
But even then, Microsoft is testing "Hot Patching" windows installation so critical updates install without requiring a reboot [1].
When that comes out, I wonder where the goalposts will be?
[1] https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/micr...
What are you doing on a desktop computer that can only be off for five minutes a year?
A laptop is even dumber to complain about, because they're (suppose to be) suspended every time you close them.