All of our laptops are either Mac or Linux. Eight or ten years ago it was all Mac but now it's mostly Linux. Ultimately, clients that have closed Windows ecosystems always provide us with laptops or a jump station to connect to. So if they are going to do that anyway, there was no need for us to Windows internally.
First of I run linux on my personal machine.
Second, I shut down my work machine at the end of the day and if there is an update - let it update. The result? Not a single problem with windows updates in years! Strange, I know.
Sidenote: I always thought people were partially making fun of windows updates because you have to reboot all the time. I have to log out to switch from integrated to dedicated graphics in Linux and pretty much 90% of all updates require a reboot. And to conserve battery I have to shut down the laptop anyway, since hibernation is but a dream. But whatever, it's not a competition.
Windows Update is just dogslow and forces a reboot. For me even a significant distro update takes much less time and it doesn't force you to reboot (nor to update for that matter).
I don't have to reboot after an update very often, almost never really. It's kernel updates where I have to reboot, other stuff I can restart and avoid it that way if I still want to keep the pc on.
I know on some systems hibernation (suspend-to-disk) can be fiddly. For me it worked out of the box which was nice.
When you have a nice setup in programming (compiler, database, diverse docs, shells etc), you don't want to shut all that down. If you can, good for you!
My dev VM is almost entirely disposable. Could be up and running again, fresh in 30-60min, not counting time to pull the repo. Why use a local db server? Seems weird to me but, I came to development through SysAdmin and support stuff, so, was used to not owning the machine that I was on. That probably has heavily influenced my workflow.
Out of curiosity, would you mind sharing a bit any the languages/frameworks and workflows that you are using? I'm mainly using Go, C++, Python, and a few others and just having trouble figuring out how I'd arrive at a situation like that. No CI/CD and test systems?
My favourite kind of updates are those that happen on a Friday afternoon where you push all the buttons you think you have to, and it looks like it's getting on with it, so you switch the monitor off and go home for the weekend, then when you come back in on Monday there's another popup that says "you have to push this button for no reason before I'll install these updates" and then you have to sit there watching it update because it's sat there for the entire fucking weekend waiting for you to push that stupid pointless button.
I wish there was a checkbox that says "Complete updates without requiring any further user input. Wanna reboot? Reboot. Wanna download some shit? Download some shit. Wanna start installing some shit? Install some shit. Wanna repeat over and over? Repeat over and over" or something like that.
That last paragraph.... WINBLOWS ALREADY DOES THIS!
i swear it does it when it's not supposed to. In the past 6 months my desktop has been waking up from sleep, and also me, just to start an update I was even unaware was happening. And if it's not updating the system it sits there at the login screen.
So I've started shutting my pc down before bed to avoid this happening.
Edit: not the checkbox thing. It updates and downloads stuff sometimes without me telling it to.
Windows updates always release on the second Tuesday of every month. They have been doing that for 20 years or so. How does anyone get surprised by them?
The only out of line updates are critical security fixes for actively exploited issues and those are rare.
Itβs not the surprise. Itβs the soul crushing, unavoidable inconvenience of never having any say as ads get forced, new unwanted features get added, more AI bullshit injected, more updates now, no matter what you have going onβ¦ for all time.
Itβs the fact that there is no choice for users but to just accept that Microsoft is forcing them to turn the computer they had last year into a totally different computer this year.
I had Windows force a reboot and I could not do anything about it. And in multiple cases it did not let me to shut down my laptop without installing updates. It's really fun when you're in a rush and have to leave and take your laptop with you, but Microshit does not let you shutdown your fucking PC without doing updates for the next 15-20 minutes :)