image caption: A Microsoft Windows screen showing “Active Hours” with start time set to 12 AM and end time set to 12 AM and an error that says “Choose an end time that’s no more than 18 hours from the start time”.
image caption: A Microsoft Windows screen showing “Active Hours” with start time set to 12 AM and end time set to 12 AM and an error that says “Choose an end time that’s no more than 18 hours from the start time”.
Windows turned that off because people refused to reboot for weeks. You can get more time with Windows pro, but updates are still inevitable.
This is because many (most?) updates aren’t actually applied until you reboot. Same goes for Linux and macOS, actually, but Linux will happily let you keep your machine vulnerable to getting hacked for months.
Easiest way to prevent unexpected reboots is to manually reboot. There are ways to mutilate your OS to turn off the forced reboots, but Windows recovers from such mutilation remarkably well as an antivirus defence.
Microsoft won’t back down, unfortunately. You could also install another OS if you’re sick of Windows and don’t care about system updates. Most of Lemmy will happily recommend a selection of fringe Linux distros are in style these days. Or you could run ChromeOS Flex on your machine, or throw a load of money at Apple, those won’t force you to reboot either!
my next laptop is going to be linux anyway :)
Linux “reboots” every program and service it updates separately.
So the only update that needs a reboot is one of the kernel, which doesn’t happen often.
With Enterprise Linux, you can update the kernel without a reboot, too.
Yes, RHEL and Ubuntu Pro have live kernel patching, but that only includes patches for select vulnerabilities and doesn’t always work depending on the state of the kernel (i.e. is the kernel tainted).
Your Linux distro doesn’t automatically relaunch your desktop session or browser. You need to close+reooen or log out/log in for updates to apply. That’s why Linux and software like Firefox constantly complain when you haven’t restarted after an update.
Obviously there’s a small handful of things that would require a reboot, but unlike Windows, the vast majority of programs in user space don’t require reboots on update.
There’s also the fact that restarting Windows to update is a much slower and more disruptive experience than restarting Linux.
Sad you included this misinformation in your otherwise good comment. Linux fundamentally works different and you can often update binaries as well as the kernel without rebooting.
And even if you couldn’t, that’s 100% a user problem. Every distro I’ve ever seen makes it clear as day when you do need to restart, so this is 100% a user issue. But I guess people will also complain if their OS forces them to reboot (like this post), so… 🤷🏼♂️
Linux can patch the executables on disk (as can Windows, with more trickery) while the system is running, but this still leaves the running processes in a vulnerable state.
The Linux kernel can be replaced on the fly, but this isn’t enabled on most distros. Even with it enabled, kpatch/livepatch isn’t a universal fix.
Replacing /usr/bin/firefox doesn’t fix anything if you don’t restart Firefox itself. The write lock on a running process isn’t what’s preventing Windows from being patched without a reboot.
On my box updating firefox and then restarting it won’t even launch the new version because NixOS knows I’m logged in and won’t just change things in my environment. But unless there’s a kernel update yes
nixos rebuild switchfollowed by logging out and logging in is equivalent to rebooting as it will automatically shut down and restart all system services, I think even systemd itself. Modulo some wibbles around kernel modules but those fall under kernel updates in my book.Contrast Ubuntu, which really likes to prompt your for reboots. The difference between a distro primarily for desktop use and one that can also do desktop because also devops want a desktop. Hey I could spin up 1000 cloud instances of my desktop with a couple of keystrokes isn’t that impressively useless :)
With windows pro you can use Group Policy to disable them completely actually, though it’s obv not a good idea
Open Group Policy Object Editor. Navigate to Computer Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Update. Set Configure Automatic Updates to Disabled.
ROFL
If Microsoft really cares for more users keeping their system updated they should fix their update process.
While some updates require a reboot on other OSes for them to take effect they don’t require work during the reboot maximizing the downtime.
Which is on top of the work done before rebooting, on the background, unprompted, destroying system performance.
Mine doesn’t reboot on it’s own and I don’t recall ever changing any settings to prevent it other than messing with the thing OP is talking about which wouldn’t let me turn it off. I get nag screens daily after a while but it never actually restarts. Maybe one of my applications prevents it or something.
It’s possible you don’t notice. Whole Windows applications aren’t as good as those on macOS, Windows does try to restart and reposition existing software after a reboot these days.
I found myself a little confused where my search window went when I went to the bathroom. Turned out Windows had rebooted itself and relaunched my browser and IDE. The only state it seemed to have missed were a few tool windows.
I don’t think that was it because it was nagging me every day for a few weeks until I finally got a free weekend to deal with the updates. I have a ton of shit going all the time and restarting is kind of a chore.