> Microsoft didn't have a choice. Given an option regular users will never update their computers
I think this is a misconception.
A few weeks ago I was updating my Windows 7 install that hadn't booted for a year or so. I opened Windows Update. It looked for updates, and found some. I clicked the update button. It proceeded to start downloading, by which I mean it would hang for 1 to 2 minutes and then download very quickly.
When it was done updating, it required a reboot. After the reboot it needed to do something for another 5 minutes. The last 2 of those minutes it showed 100% progress, seemingly stuck again. Then when that was done, it rebooted again.
I started Windows Update again. It looked for updates. There were more updates. I clicked the update button. It proceeded to start downloading, by which I mean it would hang for 1 to 2 minutes and then download very quickly.
When it was done updating, it required a reboot... and so on, and so on, 5 or so times. Every iteration took somewhere between 10 and 45 minutes. Determining how long an iteration would take was impossible, because everything appeared to just get stuck all the time. This has been the Windows update experience through XP, Vista, 7, 8 and now 10.
The result of this madness is of course that nobody updates Windows. To solve that, you can go two different ways: Make updates painless, or force everyone to go through the pain again, and again, and again. Microsoft being Microsoft, they picked the latter.
Meanwhile, on a typical Linux system, I just decide to update every once in a while. I make it look for updates, get a list of everything that will get updated, and accept. It starts downloading, by which I mean it immediately downloads everything very quickly.
When it is done updating, it may require a reboot if the kernel got updated. After the reboot it doesn't have to do anything.
I make it look for updates, and there are none. Updating my system actually brought it up-to-date. This generally takes 2 to 15 minutes, almost entirely dependent on the amount of data that needs to be downloaded.
The result of this is that I update my Linux systems very often. It's painless, so why not?
The update loop on Windows 7 is more an artifact of the traditional Windows servicing model where updates aren’t cumulative and only periodically were cumulative bundles released, as well as service packs incorporating prior hotfixes as well.
The Windows 10 servicing model doesn’t have that problem, a new cumulative update gets pushed out every month and can get a machine to the latest update for that branch regardless of how long it’s been out of contact with Windows Update. The semi-annual branches can also be directly upgraded to from any prior branch, as they are essentially a full upgrade of Windows just like moving between releases of Ubuntu/Fedora/etc.
It's great that they fixed that part, but to be honest that was the most excusable of the problems. I understand that maintaining an update path from any old version to the current one can be hard, so updating in steps is fine.
None of the other problems are excusable though.
No download should take 2 minutes to start, especially from a company like Microsoft. Sure, an anomaly is possible, but this update loop took several hours and every iteration was like that.
No update should ever take 5 minutes after the reboot, especially on an SSD.
No progress meter (that isn't dependent on a remote service) should ever be at 100% for 40% of its total runtime.
45 to 90 mins to update my Macs. They might not reboot 5 to 10 times but it's not quick.
19.04 Ubuntu just died on me today (I know some expert could have gotten in working). Apparently 19.04 support ended and someone took down the servers. So trying to update would tell me something about the servers having no release file. And they wouldn't let me update to 20.04 until I patched 19.04. I never modded anything. Whatever broke it broke itself. I searched the net for answers but my search foo sucked. Someone said download the 19.04 ISO and extract the sources.list file out. I did, it had different repos but got the same errors (with the source urls pointing to the new places of course)
So, 8 hours later I just finished reformatted the drive and installed 20.04
> I searched the net for answers but my search foo sucked.
Do not feel bad about it at all: somehow it seems impossible to search for answers related to Ubuntu. Anything related is for something like 14.* or 12.* releases. I do not understand what is going on: are people really not asking the questions for newer versions, both Google and DDG not properly ranking or are the questions/answers getting somehow marked as dupe and deleted?
19.04 isn't an LTS (long term support) release, it has 9 months of support, you're supposed to upgrade to the next release in a timely manner.
If you're not going to do release upgrades frequently you should stick to LTS releases (20.04 is one), which are supported for over 4 years: https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle
Cononical should really keep the old repos up for longer. At least the parts necessary for upgrading to the next version. 19.04 is barely over a year old. It's entirely reasonable for users to leave a computer for a few months and expect it to still work when they come back.
Sure they could use LTS but that has the same problem, just on a longer timescale.
I could turn on a PC with the first Windows 10 beta and it would update to the latest Windows 10 no problem. There's no reason Ubuntu can't do the same.
I don't know why major distribution upgrades are so unreliable. I used to be a Fedora user and it was pretty much impossible to upgrade the distribution version without breaking a lot of stuff. The package manager corrupted its own database once. I switched to Arch Linux and never had these problems ever again despite all the memes about Arch being unstable.
Updates are cumulative now to avoid such issues. Prior to this, the updating choices were geared towards regular users, so that such a case wasn't really counted...
I think this is a misconception.
A few weeks ago I was updating my Windows 7 install that hadn't booted for a year or so. I opened Windows Update. It looked for updates, and found some. I clicked the update button. It proceeded to start downloading, by which I mean it would hang for 1 to 2 minutes and then download very quickly.
When it was done updating, it required a reboot. After the reboot it needed to do something for another 5 minutes. The last 2 of those minutes it showed 100% progress, seemingly stuck again. Then when that was done, it rebooted again.
I started Windows Update again. It looked for updates. There were more updates. I clicked the update button. It proceeded to start downloading, by which I mean it would hang for 1 to 2 minutes and then download very quickly.
When it was done updating, it required a reboot... and so on, and so on, 5 or so times. Every iteration took somewhere between 10 and 45 minutes. Determining how long an iteration would take was impossible, because everything appeared to just get stuck all the time. This has been the Windows update experience through XP, Vista, 7, 8 and now 10.
The result of this madness is of course that nobody updates Windows. To solve that, you can go two different ways: Make updates painless, or force everyone to go through the pain again, and again, and again. Microsoft being Microsoft, they picked the latter.
Meanwhile, on a typical Linux system, I just decide to update every once in a while. I make it look for updates, get a list of everything that will get updated, and accept. It starts downloading, by which I mean it immediately downloads everything very quickly.
When it is done updating, it may require a reboot if the kernel got updated. After the reboot it doesn't have to do anything.
I make it look for updates, and there are none. Updating my system actually brought it up-to-date. This generally takes 2 to 15 minutes, almost entirely dependent on the amount of data that needs to be downloaded.
The result of this is that I update my Linux systems very often. It's painless, so why not?