On Linux, when you update, it downloads the latest thing and installs it. 10 minutes tops. On arch you gotta watch it a bit more, but you signed up for that.
On windows it updates almost as frequently as Linux. Except it takes much longer to update. A new install can sit there churning for more than a half hour. Why? Didn’t I just download the latest iso? Even the incremental ones are painful. It also does this sequential crap where it updates, reboots, and then updates again. (Sometimes even a third time). Then you’ve got the bugs. I don’t think there’s been a single windows update in over a year that just went smoothly. I’ve run across two that flat out refused to install (blocking further updating), and one that broke things.
Windows update is bad enough for a regular use case. It’s downright painful if you haven’t booted windows in a while (think dual boot setups) where you have to pay this update tax just because you switched to windows to do that one thing.
The author is not being whiny, they are 100% correct.
I have encountered a windows update that refused to install with a mysterious error code. After searching through the logs, I discovered it was refusing to proceed because it found an installer for an old version of the Netware client (that wasn’t installed) that it knew was incompatible, in a non-common directory (C:\PreviousHardDrive\Backups). It was searching the whole hard drive against a database of incompatible programs.
This situation was the reason for me killing off my dual boot system and making it Linux only. I had kept Windows around for a few specific tools and games, but it was a roll of the dice if I could even use it when I needed because of the update situation.
I have a seperate drive and I physically unplug my windows drive when I’m not using it. when I do, plunplug Linux then plug in windows, hate myself for a while, then revert back.
I refuse to let microslop even see the Linux install since I know they are malicious criminal company and will tamper with shit just because.
So many times my dual boot SSD has borked itself from malicious window updates killing off my Linux bootloader and attempting to make windows primary. Causes so much fstab and hassle to fix when Linux boots into crashed grub shell. Only for windows to BSOD and not boot anyway requiring reinstall of windows over and over again. Windows is truly hemorrhoids.
Windows 10 to 11, or feature updates, are the worst. Sometimes literal hours with adequate RAM, storage space, and NVME drive. It’s insane.
Install Linux, Problem Solved.
I use windows like once a year to update some random bios or firmware and it always takes a goddamn long time. I needed to use intel eeupdate to fix wrong checksum on my ghetto cheap intel 10g nic and it took like an hour of update bootloop in my seldom used windows drive. I still have some linux computers using ide drives and its faster to update.
It’s a torture for seldom used Linux PCs as well. In short any PC that isn’t updated for a long period of time is going to spend a long period of time updating with the possibility of breaking things.
Their update server seems universally throttled. It should somehow selectively throttle, like default to a slow download but if the user is sitting right there and needs to use the damn laptop, allow a button to manually release throttling and download quickly.
I’ve had nothing but problems with win update. Since I’ve switched to the win10 alphabet version recently to get extended update support, update seems to fail and require manual download of update packages. It’s been a real pain.
“I enrolled my laptop into Windows 11 Insiders Program that delivers updates on a more frequent basis, turned it off for half a year and then got mad that I missed a bunch of updates, so I decided to sit there and mash the update button to constantly ping for updates instead of doing literally anything else while it’s updating, because I wanted to run tests and had to be fully up-to-date.”
Microslop got a lot of issues, but this is fucking ridiculous, the author sounds insufferable.
“But who in the temple is going to sit there for 10 minutes or more while this downloads new updates and reboots?”
Oh, idk, people who don’t enroll themselves into a faster paced update cycle.
“And may the gods help you if you buy a brand new PC that’s been sitting on a shelf for months or years. You might have hours of updates after you first take it out of the box.”
I don’t know a single piece of electronic that doesn’t require updating after purchasing. Hours, though? Is this guy on a 10kbps connection or where is this fantasy coming from?
This has nothing to do with the insider program though. They mentioned it because it makes the situation even worse just because of the large number of updates. I’ve had the same thing happen to me multiple times on my windows 10 copy that is not enrolled in the insider program.
I don’t know a single piece of electronic that doesn’t require updating after purchasing. Hours, though? Is this guy on a 10kbps connection or where is this fantasy coming from?
No, it’s slow regardless of your connection. That’s because you’re stuck in a loop of:
- windows wrongly reporting no updates available so you have to keep clicking on “check for updates” for a few minutes until it shows available updates, and then it only shows a small subset of the actual available updates
- the updates downloading and installing unreasonably slowly, sometimes freezing for several minutes with no indication of progress
- windows requesting a reboot, refusing to find any more available updates without you doing it
- slow reboot because it’s installing updates
- go to step 1 for several more times
For reference, I’ve updated arch linux setups after many months of not using them and the process takes ~10 mins at worst, and that’s an OS that assumes you update it regularly. You can probably do an entire major release update on debian/ubuntu in the same time that windows takes to install ~6 months of regular updates. It’s inexcusable and it’s pretty clear that windows doesn’t give a shit for anyone that doesn’t use it daily, which is exactly the point the article is making.
I’m on Fedora and for me it is as simple as
sudo dnf upgrade --refresh -y, Come back in 5 minutes and manually restart.There is no babysitting required. You can see the realtime progress of the entire process if you want to. It does not need reboots to install other updates. The updates don’t refuse to install if you’ve removed Edge Browser or any other ‘necessary’ (BS) software.
