"Windows users still think it's funny to joke that running Linux means learning to build your own OS from sticky tape, glue, toothpicks and cardboard tubes. It's not like that anymore and hasn't been for most of this century"
Not only has it not been the case for most of this century but, as a Linux user, it seems to me that this is exactly what running Windows has become. I have one old laptop with a W10 partition on it which isn't used much but I do tend to force myself to go through the pain of regular updates.
To get from the menu to where Windows update starts to throw dots across the top of its window probably takes about as many clicks but more time than getting from a Linux menu to Synaptic starting to run the actual upgrades. Note that to get there for Synaptic includes having completed the equivalent of that throwing dots stage. Note also that Linux, even using sudo, takes a stronger line on security then Windows and will have required a password to run Synaptic so the time to do that will have been included. (If the inconvenience of a password is what puts you off using Linux, there is something seriously adrift with your priorities.)
If I choose to do so I can review exactly what packages Synaptic is going to upgrade and I can watch the commands streaming smoothly past (Windows is still throwing dots). With Windows I will eventually see a rather opaque short list of updates it proposes to install including the one that it failed to install last month and the month before plus that same Intel display update that seems to get installed every month and comes back next month.
If I'm lucky Windows will install these with only a single reboot needed. The reboot will, of course, take ages to complete because although it also took ages to get to the reboot a lot of the updates are done at the reboot stage. With Linux reboot is almost always confined to kernel updates which, running LTS kernels, aren't that frequent and is simply a matter of restarting as and when is convenient so that the new kernel, which is ready and waiting, can be used. For everything else the executables are simply put in place so that next time a program is executed the new binaries are used. Services are written to be restarted so if a new version of a service is installed that's what happens. In many years I've seen exactly one service that was so low level it needed a reboot but, again, not urgently but just in the normal course of shutting down and starting up again
In practice I find it's even quicker to fire up the terminal emulator, su and run three apt commands than click around menus but if GUI is your preference then that's fine but this elephant in the Windows room has to be addressed:
There's that hanging update on W10 that won't go away. The oh-so-slick, oh-so-clever Windows initial set up created a partition which it has now decided is too small. What's the solution to that? AFAICS you're supposed to shrink your C: drive - assuming it's not too full for that - drop into the command line, look up some info on that too-small partition, take a note of it, delete the partition (no, not your C: drive's partition - did you screw up there?), recreate it to a larger size and run some stuff manually based on the note you took, all at the command line. How's that for string and sealing wax?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
