Firstly, it'll keep prompting even if you choose "restart later".
Secondly, unlike most linux environments, it doesn't perform the updates which take effect next restart, it actually performs the update next restart.
That means if you find yourself needing to restart forgetting you've updated, you can find yourself suddenly having to wait a very long time before your computer is usable again.
They often take multiple 'restarts' to apply, typically you might have to wait the first shutdown, then when it boots back up it'll be "applying updates", then it'll restart again having done those updates. Occasionally you'll even get a third restart.
That's compared to 'nix applying the updates but them not having taken effect until a restart which isn't normally noticeably slower than any other restart.
I generally allow rebooting after each update is downloaded. I haven't had any case where it did not take a long time, and putting off the reboot until after a second set of updates has downloaded doesn't seem to make it significantly worse.
Eh. I regularly update my Windows gaming PC and every time it takes a long time to restart and apply updates. Far more than macOS and Ubuntu. And this is not new behaviour.
And then Windows decides you've had enough time to reboot. And you have to click "Ask me again for reboot in 4 hours", because 4 hours is the maximum time the system will allow. And repeat this every 4 hours.
In Windows 10 it's even worse, you have to define off-hours when you're not using the PC, and in those hours the device will reboot itself if it feels like it. Don't worry, the applications you had open will be restarted, surely no data can be lost.
Edit: Windows 10 even has the configuration panel "Restart Options," which tells you "We'll show a reminder when we're going to restart. If you want to see more notifications about restarting, turn this on".
I've also had lots of trouble with failing updates.
You’re a student who needs to take notes for a class. You open your laptop to find that the battery has died. No problem. You’ll just plug the charger in. But, unbeknownst to you, it had downloaded an update silently the last time you used it. Now that it’s booting up you’ll get nothing but a Windows Update screen for the next 15 minutes.
You’re at the doctor’s office waiting for an appointment. You open your laptop for a minute to check your mail. Surprise! Windows is booting up with an update. The nurse then calls your name and you have to carry your laptop around with the lid open like a jackass or risk bricking it.
* Windows's reboot nag screen is way more insistent and naggy, OSX just has a notification in a corner going "there are updates available", Windows has a big dialog front and center, which comes back frequently
* Windows updates requiring reboots are significantly more frequent than OSX's
* Windows will eventually refuse to put things off and reboot on its own, IME OSX won't
* The Windows update process takes ages, and there's literally nothing you can do with the machine during it
Having both Windows ans OSX personal machines, updates to the Windows one annoy me much more than OSX's. Though to be fair the W10 experience is still a significant improvement over the XP and W7 days (I haven't had an update repeatedly fail yet).
> Though to be fair the W10 experience is still a significant improvement over the XP and W7 days (I haven't had an update repeatedly fail yet).
I am on the other side of that fence, managing about 100 machines across all versions W7-W10 and Server 2008-2016.
Win7 boxes are by far the most stable desktops, in the past year I have had at least ten win10 systems blow up due to updates, stuck in and endless loop of installing at shutdown and reverting at startup. A few weeks ago two stock server 2016's with nothing but SQL Server installed outright died to a windows update (unbootable).
I am never upgrading my personal windows machines past windows 7.
Recently I pulled my laptop out of my bag and tried to turn it on to copy CD with MRI results. I was greeted by "Keep you computer on. Windows is updating."
Good that it turned out I really didn't have to copy that CD then.
I mostly use my PC for gaming, and work on osx, so both of these are game-related, but:
- The update popup often tabs you out from full screen applications. For exclusive full screen games, it often takes a couple seconds to tab back in, so in any kind of skill intensive game you're now way behind.
- The download/p2p upload mechanism does not respect 'active hours'; updates will happily hog your entire bandwidth and destroy your latency.
You cannot use the computer during the update process. The update process is incredibly slow may get stuck for hours on some machines and sometimes it may not even work at all!
For me, updates are painful because they don't work. They just make you waste your time and then roll back the machine to where it was before the update.
Indeed, it's apples and oranges, but not in the way that you think.
An OS connected to the Internet is secure given a good firewall that blocks all incoming traffic. Firewalls are a solved problem and ship with every mainstream desktop OS.
Browsers on the other hand are directly exposing the user to the web, being the primary attack vector for mallware and viruses. This issue is made much worse given that browsers download and execute JavaScript code locally, the potential for remote exploits being enormous. And historically speaking their attack surface has been much greater due to the proliferation of plugins, like Flash, Java or Adobe Acrobat, which have been exploited again and again — thankfully we've gotten rid of them.
The OS can help somewhat in securing the browser or any process of course, but it's never foolproof on mobile devices, as can be seen by the dozens of iOS exploits used to jailbreak it and it's a pretty weak protection for the desktop — a compromised browser on the desktop means you're pretty much screwed.
This is why the browser has to be the ultimate sandbox. Because it's directly exposed, because it executes code loaded from random locations on the web and because it's been abused by plugin makers, as everybody wants a piece of it.
That's a failing of your software, not the customer.
OSX and Chrome gets it right. It's possible.