I started daily driving Linux since I left school this year and used it before but mainly windows because school wanted us to run Word, Teams, etc.
Today I wanted to play games and haven’t set up my device for gaming and didn’t want to download the game twice (good internet).
Like a good PC user I wanted to do my updates. It really sucks on windows. I had three windows updates to make, one crashed. It rebooted my device 4 times. Also I needed to update other drivers and applications. Now I really appreciate package managers more than ever before.
Windows: "Time for updates! Stop everything you're doing and please wait...please wait...please wait...please wait..."
How am I hearing about this all the time, but it has never happened for me? Every windows update for me so far has always gone the same, unintrusive way - when it's time to shut down the PC in the evening, I notice there's an "Install Updates and Shutdown" option next to the normal "shutdown" option, which I use if I'm not in a terrible hurry right now. Takes a little longer to shut down, next boot will also take a little longer, but that's it. I've literally never had these unwelcome interruptions I hear so frequently about.
I literally sat for 30 minutes on a slow work laptop that still had a spinning rust drive once after turning it on waiting for Windows to finish an update it started the night before when I told it to install updates and shut down instead of just shut down. It was quite embarrassing waiting in front of a client before I could get any work done.
Usually it's pretty ok but I remember once being in an online PvP match and windows decided right then it NEEDED to update and started the process. It just went into update mode and restarted (oh so slowly) - my guess is there was a popup that I didn't see due to being in-game and it just went ahead and overrode whatever I was doing to update.
Oh it works if you're always not in a hurry. Try not clicking that for a few days and it will decide that it's ok to shutdown your computer in the middle of a meeting.
Happened to me once. I came home from workz and just wanted to watch some TV series on VLC before bed. Instead, Windows update told me it was upgrading and I only had the choice to delay for one minute. Okay, whatever, I thought. I let it happen. Then hours passed. Hours more. I just went to bed while it updated. In the morning, I had a new version of Windows I never asked for, and it never told me it was instaling.
I think it is more gentle when you actually use the OS. But OP says they don't use it a lot. I basically don't use Windows a lot for so many reasons, but in the odd occasion I need to use it, it's like OP's experience. There are so many updates and the thing insists on installing them, or you think it's gonna be okay to install them --accostumed to pacman, apt or whatever. If you agree or click on Install updates as they recommend, there you go into the rabbit hole of Windows updates.
This. I have to use Windows for work and it doesn't actually update that often. And when it does, I just choose "update tonight" and it updates when I go to shut down at the end of the day. But at home where I have a Linux/Windows dual boot, it seems to update every time I boot it up. My Linux install seems to also have a lot of updates but it just shows a tray icon and lets me do it whenever.
On personal PC maybe not, but when you're using a Windows PC for work that is enrolled and controlled by your IT, the update can be enforced and there's no way to postpone it from your side.
I have never had that happen. Distros usually disable the built-in updater and even if they didn't, the updater merely shows a pop-up asking you to download the new version.
I did that yesterday and Ubuntu 23.04 crashed, it only showed a black screen with a cursor and nothing worked. I had to force shutdown and reboot. It's the first time it has happened to me. Maybe an Nvidia issue?