It's slow even on my PCIe 4 NVMe drive. I boot into Windows once a week or two and I often see it spending more than 5 minutes installing a single update package. This is even slower than apt and dpkg, props to them.
Your installation of Windows is that by any chance the installation that came with computer? Or is it a Windows that you have upgraded from a previous version (and perhaps that was upgraded from yet another previous version)?
I never have these slow downs that I read others have. I always do a clean install from a USB stick (including deleting recovery partitions). I do this like once a year or 1 1/2 years when something is being released that is either a new version or what is we used to call a service packs.
Windows sucks at upgrading. There is always something strange going on after upgrading. Things that not happens after a clean install.
If it is looong time since you have performed a clean install, I recommend you to consider doing that.
I installed last year when I got the computer and drive, and it's still pretty clean since I don't really use Windows these days. Or was clean until I upgraded to 11 last week.
But this has always been my experience. I remember reinstalling Windows 7 and waiting hours for Windows Update to finish. Even checking for updates could take 20 minutes.
yeah, endless hours spend waiting for Windows Update. It is not so bad anymore.
The only thing I can think about comparing your setup to mine is that I rarely turns off my computer. If you only use your very infrequent and turn it off when not used. I wonder if Windows is doing all kinds of maintenance jobs every time you start your computer since it is off most of the time, and then when you manually hit windows update, it gets a bit busy working out the correct state of your computer
Those jobs are on my computer distributed over days / weeks but wit you they run every time you turn on windows since it couldn't run them at their scheduled frequency since the computer was off.
I am just speculating, but maybe try to turn on windows once in a while and leave it over night, to test if this improves things.
Not to diminish package managers, I don't think they are having to be quite as clever as Windows update, at least historically. I could be wrong, but I think they are more like dependency tree managers that also download and execute new installers.
No, they aren't clever. They're practical. There's no such thing as execution here. Packages are archives containing the entire files not differences. The manager downloads it, unpacks it, and adds/removes/replaces the package's files in the system.
They can also execute post-install or post-update scripts. And indeed, Linux package managers aren't as fancy as Windows Update is, but that fanciness isn't something I miss.
My distro's package manager probably breaks my system if it loses power during an update. Even so, it's been one of the more reliable and pleasant to use programs I've encountered.
I also have a PCIe NVMe boot drive, typically i don't even notice updates until i go to shut my PC down in the evenings and windows tells me it'd like a few mins to do the updates.
Same difference to me, i was shutting it down and walking away anyway
I never have these slow downs that I read others have. I always do a clean install from a USB stick (including deleting recovery partitions). I do this like once a year or 1 1/2 years when something is being released that is either a new version or what is we used to call a service packs.
Windows sucks at upgrading. There is always something strange going on after upgrading. Things that not happens after a clean install.
If it is looong time since you have performed a clean install, I recommend you to consider doing that.