Reply to post: Re: spends most of its time updating

70% of Windows 10 users are totally happy with our big telemetry slurp, beams Microsoft

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: spends most of its time updating

"If you only turn it on for an hour a month then it downloads and starts installing all of the updates, you turn it off in disgust as it's used half of that updating"

The great mystery to many of us is why it needs to do updates this way. Earlie todayr I got an alert that my system had one update. The system's discovering that had no noticeable effect on performance. I don't set the system to autoupdate so a few moments ago I ran the update. One package was updated: 258kB downloaded at 636 kB/s and installed with no noticeable effect on performance. The whole update took seconds of elapsed time.

Clearly there'd be many more packages to update if I left it to be a monthly task. Even so I know from large updates, say the mass that occur when, as you describe, an infrequently used box is switched on, that it doesn't take anything as long as the equivalent Windows update, it doesn't impede performance to any noticeable extent, it stops and restarts any services which have had an update without reboots, it doesn't require long delays to shut down after an update nor on the consequent restart and, in fact, the only sort of update that requires a reboot at all is when the kernel itself has been updated.

FreeBSD is pretty similar (it's a while since I tried PC-BSD, based on FreeBSD and found it to be inexplicably similar to Windows in this respect).

So why is it that Windows updates are such a major production?

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