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Comment by bayindirh

11 hours ago

Ubuntu's stable builds do not upgrade kernel and its close vicinity every week, AFAIK. I have a couple of servers with unattended updates enabled, and they do not greet me with "System Reboot Required" banner every week, and if that's required, the server is back with all services running <30 seconds.

OTOH, I upgraded my parents' PC yesterday, after three months of downtime. It really took at least two hours and four reboots. The machine was screaming and the task manager showed a blue rectangle for CPU load (uninterrupted 100%) and a green one for the disk load (again, uninterrupted 100%) while nothing was usable all the time.

Same process takes <10m in Linux (specifically Debian), and an optional reboot, without any hardware load drama.

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.

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