| Well, it's not always an advantage. It's just the consequences of a different locking philosophy. Windows patches are a much bigger pain in the ass to deal with on a month-to-month basis, but Linux patches can really bite you. Example 1: Say I have an application 1 that uses shared library X, and a application 2 that spawns an external process every 5 minutes that uses library X and communicates in some way with application 1. Now let's say that library X v2.0 and v2.1 are incompatible, and I need to apply an update. On Windows, if I update this program, it will keep running until the system is rebooted. Updates, although they take significant time due to restarts, are essentially atomic. The update either applies to the entire system or none of the system. The system will continue to function in the unpatched state until after it reboots. On Linux, it's possible for application 1 to continue to run with v2.0 of the shared library, while application 2 will load v2.1, and suddenly your applications stop working. You have to know that your security update is going to cause this breaking change and you need to deal with it immediately after applying the update. Example 2: A patch is released which, unbeknownst to you, causes your system to be configured in a non-bootable state. On Windows, you'll find out immediately that your patch broke the system. It's likely (but not certain) to reboot again, roll back the patch, and return to the pre-patched state. In any event, you will know that the breaking patch is one that was in the most recently applied batch. On Linux, you may not reboot for months. There may be dozens or hundreds of updates applied before you reboot your system and find that it's not in a bootable state, and you'll have no idea which patch has caused your issue. If you want your system in a known-working state, you'll have to restore it prior to the last system reboot. And God help you if you made any configuration changes or updates to applications that are not in your distro's repository. |