Installing updates during a shutdown or restart is a recent phenomenon in the lifetime of the Windows NT family. Windows XP post-SP2, if memory serves, attempted to offer-up updates via the Explorer shutdown/restart/logoff dialog. Windows 8 (again, if memory serves) was the first version that was more "militant" about forcing update installation. Windows 7 was the last of the client-oriented versions of Windows that permitted you to (easily) defer updates indefinitely.

Windows 7 regularly wanted to force me to update on shutdown. I remember it well, because at the time, I was doing my first startup and had a train to catch in the evening, so I regularly had to hit the power because the train wasn't going to wait for Windows to update. It infuriated me so much.

Windows 7 update installation was easy to bypass, however, and still get a clean shutdown. You could use the command/line shutdown command to restart or shutdown w/o installing updates. In Windows 8 and following they put that idiocy into logonUI.exe (which runs outside your logon session) to force update installation.

Well, if there was a way to bypass it, I never found it. Often when I shut down, it gave me the "windows is updating, please wait and don't turn your computer off" message with no options.

It's the reason I developed the muscle memory for Windows-key / R / shutdown -r -t 1 -f / Enter.

Shift-click, it would shut down without loading them.

A few years too late. Pity it wasn't discoverable, because I never knew about it. I'm happily running anything but windows nowadays. (MacOS for work, Linux at home)

Crazy feature. Many times you are just shutting down to dash out the door, but no, windows wants to amend my schedule.

Input to computers used to be treated as commands. You would command computers to do things and they did them. Now, our input is treated either as unreliable ("Are you sure?" dialogs), treated more like a suggestion ("close app" vs "force close"), misinterpreted (oh you didn't want to run update when you issued a shutdown command?) or ignored entirely. It's gotten me irrationally angry.

I remember getting angry when I first had to ask the computer "pretty please, could you shut down," and having that possibly fail, rather than just throwing the power switch.

I remember getting angry when I first had to ask the computer "pretty please, could you eject the disk," with a non-zero chance that no, the computer is busy and you can't have your disk back.

I remember when undelete was an option, and delete was delete.

Now everything is a request. Everything second-guesses the user. Every button and switch is soft button that puts "software with lots of excuses" between you and what you want to command the computer to do. Every software iteration puts the user further and further into the backseat as a passenger rather than where they should be as the driver.

For me, OS X has always been worse about that. Want to shutdown? Better get ready to manually close every single application, because if any of them disagree then that shutdown ain't happening.

Windows does that sometimes too though. Is there no “This program isn’t responding. Do you want to force kill it?” like thing?

There technically is, but the dialog takes too long to pop up, and sometimes never does for some inexplicable reason.

Linux: sudo shutdown -h now

It does my bidding.

I've always typed poweroff. I guess that's because of my time at Sun, since that is the fastest way to shutdown a Solaris machine.

I was always under the impression that shutdown -h ran more shutdown scripts?

I was about to say—this is how I shut down macOS when it doesn't feel like cooperating.

It would of course be nice if the GUI just consistently did what it's supposed to, but oh well...

This also works in osx, and it’s much faster than the gui based shutdown.

> Want to shutdown? Oh I'm sorry windows I didn't realise you planned on doing an update!

Also recently "shut down" became "hibernate without fully taking the filesystem offline". Because clearly, that's what I meant. Not actually shut down.

I wish I had a tenner for every time I swore I disabled the last power-sucking feature only to find my ThinkPad battery was again dead after being shut down for three days.

Don't forget that Ubuntu is moving into same OUR_USERS_ARE_IDIOTS model. Obligatory reminder: https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/disabling-automatic-refresh-for... Avoid Ubuntu at all cost or you're just going to step from frying pan into fire.

Debian is a great distro that works, does what it is told.

Flatpaks work perfectly fine on Ubuntu, just remove the snaps and you'll be fine.

```flatpak permission-set flatpak updates $APPID no```

Which is why I wish people would stop recommending Ubuntu as "the" Linux distro.