Weird. My windows PC updates like your Linux machine. How often do update vs your parents? Maybe they had some larger “half” releases pending (I.e. closer to a major macOS release, which also take time)
The machine is on standby all the time. So it updates whenever it wants. In this occasion the machine was turned off for a couple of months, but the updates were not the "half release" updates. The list was .NET runtime, intel graphics drivers, some dynamic update support and the like. I was watching the machine all the time.
Funnily, dynamic updates support installation failed after all the kicking and screaming, and I didn't try. Maybe I'll look into it later.
Upgrade that PC's OS drive to a NVMe. Seriously. We manage thousands of PCs at work and ever since we got laptop models with NVMe drives, updates are a breeze with 6 ± 3 minutes of total downtime.
I'd rather teach my parents to use Linux instead. Updates will be a breeze with 3±2 minutes of total background work without any interruption and 30 seconds of occasional downtime.
I have no idea how you got to "Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair" given that I literally blamed the slow OS disk drive inside the computer based on thousands of data points on my end.
Hey, no, I don’t dispute your data points at all. A bog standard NVMe can handle ~1MIOPS these days, and it’s above and beyond what SATA SSDs can provide.
What I’m against is tolerating a bad OS design with more capable hardware and allowing Microsoft to worsen the experience. This is a pattern of Microsoft since forever.
Oh, that particular PC has no NVMe support anyway. I don’t know why that M.2 port is SATA only.
Especially when every other major OS can handle this more gracefully. I can version upgrade a fully loaded Debian installation in less than 6 minutes, reboot included, on a SATA disk, for example.
Also, while tangential, Windows providing the worst update experience, and calling Linux a major, mainstream OS superior in some ways feels unbelievable when I look back a decade.
Funnily, dynamic updates support installation failed after all the kicking and screaming, and I didn't try. Maybe I'll look into it later.