[Carpetsmoker]

I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but if you're going to do forced updates then you might as well spend some time making the entire user experience nicer. I don't know what the technical challenges are exactly, but not forcing a reboot unless there's really a critical patch might be a good start.

[corty]

And not mixing security fixes with feature upgrades, not forcing the latter to be installed would be nice. That would also reduce the massive breakage many windows updates cause due to poor quality and high change rate.

[Carpetsmoker]

I think that might actually be harder than it sounds though, since Windows is such an integrated system.

[corty]

That is a kind way of putting it. I would say Windows lacks modularity and is a messy monolith with a lot of spooky crosstalk.

[Carpetsmoker]

Yeah, maybe. I don't really know much of the Windows internals, so I try not to assume too much (hence my question in the top comment[1], which was very much a "curiosity"-question, and not a "omg, wtf"-question).

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23656237