Better an individual device has some trivial breakage for a short period of time than the whole Internet breaks. I don't think we're there yet, but it feels like we'll need to take some pretty draconian steps if we continue the way we're going. Doesn't it make sense for 99% of IoT devices to only be able to communicate via a router over WiFi?

We are talking about common desktop PCs with more or less standard set of packages, not about server machines. I seriously doubt there are any breakages there.

I've noticed that sometimes updates to Firefox cause it to stop working until it's restarted. If you're writing a long message, or filling in some form, or if you have an order confirmation page open, then you might lose that data.

I've never seen that happen in native GNU/Linux applications, though. I guess it might be related to the XUL stuff in Firefox.

But given that Firefox (and Chrome/ium) are memory hogs that eventually get OOM killed, you need to restart them periodically anyway, so it might not make a big difference if the OS does auto-updates in the background.

The windows 10 anniversary update was a nightmare for me, my office, and seemingly a lot of people[0]. Note that the update installed itself too, opting to alert me at 7pm one evening while my machine was running unattended that it was going to restart in 15 minutes.

[0] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/08/25/windows-10-...