The most sad thing for me is how Windows is such a given for PC gaming. :( It wouldn't have to be like this, there's nothing saying it should be a huge gaming OS, so it's too bad it is. I wish Valve would have been more successful with Steam OS. That would have fixed everything at least for me. As someone who otherwise likes amateur photography and programming, Linux is just as good or better at everything else with e.g. Darkroom and RawTherapee for photography, and programming being a given. Lightroom isn't even fun to use with its obnoxious enforced workflow and business model, just too bad it's so big on the plugin scene.

Windows is hanging onto this thin line, but it's a damn strong line for many.

> I wish Valve would have been more successful with Steam OS

I think Valve has done an outstanding job, unfortunately, other game studios and controller manufacturers don't seem to care.

For example Logitech gaming wheels don't support linux. Although there are pretty good reverse engineered drivers, last time I tried, force feedback support was hard to get configured and didn't work as well in games such as Euro Truck and American Truck, which have linux versions.

Now, like the OP, I had encounters with windows 10 forced updates: I stream on twitch and I recall at least one time where, from my viewers point of view, my stream abruptly terminated. Turns out Windows 10 decided to update itself locking my computer for at least 1 hr.

Steam OS is pretty dumb. Why would you want to install an OS that only works for gaming? Steam should probably work with major distros to get Steam working easily with it, so that installing Steam is easy (they don't; for example I had to delete their ancient C stdlib to make it work with my open-source AMD drivers). And closing Steam doesn't move it to the taskbar (this is known issue in their bugtracker for many years).

The OS is great, only macOS offers a similar OO ABI for the OS stack.

Also I do have quite a few war stories from failed GNU/Linux updates, that eventually lead me to always keep /home on a separate partition and wipe everything else.

I think you are right that big updates on Linux are just as difficult on Windows, but the point is that you shouldn't have to deal with the issue.

1) Yes, all OSes should respect something like the root/home separation and let you just nuke the system. But this is a lot easier in a world where all your apps are just an apt-get away.

2) In comparison to MS, every Linux seems to be a "rolling release". When we use linux we like it that we always have a not-too ancient version of GCC. But when Windows 10 starts upgrading continuously, sinister stuff gets mixed in.

Keeping /home on its own disk is Unix101

My first UNIX was called Xenix....

I don't do that. What's the reasoning behind that?

It doesn't need to be on a separate disk, just a separate partition. The reasoning is that this makes it really easy to change your distro without affecting your data: all your data is (or should be) in /home, with the possible exception of any databases or webservers you're running (which would mean you're running your PC more like a server, so this won't apply to typical desktop users). You can wipe out everything in your root partition but your data is safe and secure. Putting it on a totally separate disk makes it even more foolproof since you can just cut power to that disk and then there's no way for it to be affected by the system upgrade, but that's overkill IMO.

I was having this same issue with my Mom's PC and the Anniversary update, turns out it was having issues with one of the connected USB devices.

I ended up unplugging everything USB after I started the shutdown and it finally completed successfully.

You can recover from these repeated update failures by deleting SoftwareDistribution\Download inside the Windows directory. Search the web for details.

This kind of problem (which, I agree, happens often on different machines) is one of the main reasons I don't use Windows for working anymore.

On my gaming PC, I set windows update to just notify me about updates, but not download or install them automatically.

Trying to upgrade an operating system is almost always a good way to ensure you're going to have a bad time.

Copy any files you care about off, wipe the disk, and install from scratch. This is also usually worth doing with an OEM machine, to get rid of all the crap and weirdly configured partitions they set them up with.

> Trying to upgrade an operating system is almost always a good way to ensure you're going to have a bad time.

That's a really strong assertion to toss out without supporting evidence. I've had the opposite experience with Debian/Ubuntu (100s of systems, starting in the late 90s) and OS X (dozens of systems, starting with 10.0) — the process is almost always start the update, reboot, resume work with rare exceptions for something like previously-undetected filesystem corruption.

Even my experience on Windows has not supported that conclusion – you might always want to be ready to reimage the machine but it hasn't been rocky for at least a decade.

The difference might starting and staying clean: avoid OEM Windows installs, apply updates regularly rather than putting it off for years, don't install system-level hacks (Mac users were terrible for awhile about using “haxies” and then complaining about Apple when some random binary monkey-patching broke on the next major release), and be careful about installing software from irresponsible sources.

I agree but I'm mildly surprised when an upgrading OSX or Linux instead of a fresh install always works fine.

That's not true for Linux - I've had many instances where repo refs broke because they didn't have packages for updated version, or where the new version kernel introduced a bug breaking my WiFi, audio, graphics, or random stuff failing - it's probably worse than doing a Windows upgrade.

I've only used macs for a year and only did 10.5 -> 10.6 which went smooth IIRC. Mac approach of owning the hardware and the OS certainly has it's advantage - being able to clone image to an external HDD from my MB pro and then boot a iMac to the exact same image is a magical experience. Setting up a master image on my laptop and then redeploying to an office of 40 something various mac devices using IP broadcast and doing it in an hour - hearing that apple chime 40 times was really cool :D

I had a spectaculr Ubuntu LTS upgrade failure on a server earlier this year because I had inadvertently left a terminal open running a command with 'su'.

It transpires that the sudo binary cannot be upgraded when su is active, so the entire upgrade cascade-failed and left me with a broken and unbootable system. Had to start from bare-metal.

This is infeasible when upgrades are monthly or biweekly.