Windows has gotten pretty good at staying out of your way with updates if you have typical usage patterns. That is: either you turn it on at the beginning of the business day, it downloads updates in the background and installs them when you shut the machine down at the end of the day; Or you leave the machine on 24/7, get a couple prompts over multiple days about a scheduled restart with the option to schedule it, and if you don't react it just restarts in the dead of night (or rather, a reasonable prediction of when you won't be using the computer).

The rub is that this doesn't work as well in atypical setups like a lab. The machines are probably only on while students are using it, preventing the "install at night" strategy, and if your normal workflow includes restarts Windows will take that as a cue to finally install the update.

Of course all of this is avoidable by configuration, or by the user (restarting explicitly without updates). But the Home version hasn't always given you as much agency in this as the more expensive Windows versions.

Updates on shutdown make sense in some of my machines but are awful in the laptop I use to teach classes. When I finish a class, what I want is to leave to do something else elsewhere (often another class in a different room).

I know I could probably suspend or something, but I never do that because it used to be a lottery on Windows whether your machine would actually unsuspend or you would need to fight it pressing the power button until it rebooted (did they ever fix that?)

> Updates on shutdown make sense in some of my machines but are awful in the laptop I use to teach classes.

It's also a bad idea when the power has gone out and the UPS battery will last for only a few more minutes. Or when you have no UPS, a storm is coming which you know will cause the power to fail, and you want to orderly power everything off as quickly as possible (not to mention that losing power during a software update is not ideal).

Which is why I love the way recent Gnome does it: when powering off, the confirmation dialog has an unobtrusive checkbox (checked by default) which selects whether you want to run software updates before powering off. If you're not in a hurry, you can keep it checked and wait for the software updates to finish; if you're in a hurry, just uncheck it before confirming and it'll turn off immediately.

Is that a Windows installed by the manufacturer or a Windows installed by somebody else with possibly not all the right drivers for that machine?

That sounds like a problem from twenty years ago.

It sure does. And it's still a problem today.

A friend of mine moved from Windows to Linux many years ago because of that. He used his computer at home only in the weekends and almost every time he switched it on he had to wait for an update to download and install. Sometimes he just switched off the machine and did something else.

""For my kids' machines at home, anytime they boot windows, it will do an update, and a good percentage of the time, the update will fail, and brick the machine, requiring a complete re-install."

My wife and kids all use and have used 2nd hand company Windows 10 laptops. Since one of my roles by day is being a system administrator, i took quite some time to setup Windows 10 as they and i like it, being very very thorough in its various settings. The things just.. work..

It's quite rare if they ask for help about updates, crashes, etc. Haven't had a bricked OS since Windows ME.

Getting Fifa 23 and FC24 to work flawlessly on the Windows 10 game computer on the other hand.... Maybe i should start working for EA :)

"being very very thorough in its various settings. "

Perhaps that's the key. I don't have time for that, linux just works, though of course some apps aren't available at all on linux, hence the windows boots.

Perhaps, but Linux updates and upgrades sometimes will break things as well and require quite some time to get it right.

So you're saying approximately 3 times a week you reinstall windows on your kids machines?

It sounds from sibling comment that Windows is only booted up at irregular, far-apart times. So most likely there are weeks or months of accumulated updates all trying to go at the same time. No mention of what Windows version is running, or how old the hardware is (limited ram, slow disk, etc).

As a counterpoint anecdote, I've been using Windows 10 Pro on a half dozen both newer and older machines ever since it came out, and have never once had to re-install Windows due to a failed update (and in fact failed updates have only happened a few times, each simply requiring trying once again). But these machines are booted up and used on a regular basis.

The only time I had problems with a win10 update was the fiasco when an update broke veracrypt. But that was pretty annoying.

huh? They mostly use linux, and maybe Windows once or twice a week at most, to maybe every couple of weeks.

So for your stats, last year we re-installed the windows partition of one machine 4 times and another I think 2 or 3. Could be hardware problems, of course. But each time was triggered by a windows update, so maybe the update stressed the hardware to the point of failure, which linux does not.

I think your kid’s computer needs a new disk, that seems odd.