[dylan-m]

Some distributions are switching to a more aggressive "reboot for any system update" model, with the system built on ostree or something of the sort. For instance, Ubuntu Core, Fedora Silverblue, or Endless OS. The update is downloaded and committed to disk (in a big, git-like repo for the latter two), but you need to boot into it. Your running system is untouched. This comes with the bonus that rollback is seamless: you choose an older commit from grub and it just works.

Of course, one key difference here is the system never tricks you into rebooting, and rebooting for an update takes just as long as rebooting any other time, so mostly (pending additional work, as usual :b) it's invisible.

I seem to recall Microsoft exploring similar to ostree with some Windows version somewhere, so I'd be curious to see how theirs behaves.