If you have recently endured Windows Update for Patch Tuesday, you know that you are forced to reboot during this process. This activity will deny you "the five 9s," i.e., 99.999% availability in uptime.

If you have recently performed the analog activity on a Linux distribution, which is likely either apt update/upgrade or yum update, you will notice that a reboot is not required. These update approaches cannot alter the running kernel, but ksplice and kernelcare offer either free or low-cost options to address that.

Windows update is enormously painful compared to Linux. There can be no argument of this fact.

> This activity will deny you "the five 9s," i.e., 99.999% availability in uptime.

Which is something 99% of personal computers don’t care about even slightly. These days restarting your machine is a very inconsequential event, your browser can effortlessly reopen all the tabs you had active, macOS will even reopen all the windows for your native apps.

I don’t mean to defend Windows Update, I just think “you have to restart your computer!” is not a particularly good reason to damn it.

Windows update is agony compared to apt/yum.

A complete patch Tuesday session is twenty minutes of reduced performance, followed by a "don't reboot your computer" of unknown time both before and after the reboot.

Anything is better than that, especially when some updates either reboot immediately or kindly give you five minutes to close everything down (was tmux made precisely for Windows update?).

Exposure to apt/yum really makes Windows intolerable, just for this alone.

> especially when some updates either reboot immediately or kindly give you five minutes to close everything down

I have been a Windows user since XP. Never, not even once did Windows decide to reboot without asking first. Never.

The only way this could've have happened is if Windows kept asking you over the span of a week or 2 to restart to apply the updates and you kept postponing it.

Either way, "Hot Patching" will soon be a thing on Windows so restart won't be required every month [1].

[1] https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/micr...

I'm on a corporate desk/laptop, and I'm guessing that happens about three times per year.

That puts you in a tmux habit.

> Which is something 99% of personal computers don’t care about even slightly

to the point that I know people that still turn their computers off when they are not using them.

Let's get this out of the way first: "the five 9's" is not a requirement for personal computers. That argument therefore is invalid.

But even then, Microsoft is testing "Hot Patching" windows installation so critical updates install without requiring a reboot [1].

When that comes out, I wonder where the goalposts will be?

[1] https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/micr...

What are you doing on a desktop computer that can only be off for five minutes a year?

A laptop is even dumber to complain about, because they're (suppose to be) suspended every time you close them.

That would be a firing offense at my company. Company files stay on company hardware. Personal files stay on personal hardware, and never should the two meet.

I would never work at your company. I use my own tools, thank you.

You're own tools are your own personal files?

Interesting. How do your vacation pictures help you do your job?

Not the OP, but personal files are not just vacation pictures. I work in R&D and I have my org-mode/roam on various scientific and technical topics going back 15 years or so. I use these for work to benefit my current company, and maintaining two parallel versions of these is rather inconvenient.

Isn’t that exactly what a cloud drive is for? There’s a difference between using your personal notes for business purposes on the one hand, and keeping company property and data on a machine totally outside IT control. That’s just a massive lawsuit waiting to happen, and it’s bad for the employee too - why would you want the liability?

I would't store company data or code outside of approval services, but one might say that my notes, including notes on the people I meet and projects I work on, can constitute proprietary information - so yeah, it is a bit of a grey area still.

I am speaking of company property in only the narrowest sense, ie. physical objects and IP (and I guess property but I've been WFH for a decade, so,..

I don't want or accept IT control of my personal machine.

> How do your vacation pictures help you do your job?

This question is why I don't want the company laptop.

Are you required to maintain PCI compliance? Do you touch customer personal info?

My personal vim config on a company laptop? No problem whatsoever, neither for me, nor the company.

A bittorrent client without preauthorization with IT and security? It's basically asking to get fired.

My vacation photos on a company laptop? Tricky - not a huge deal but not recommended. Better upload them to your cloud backup quickly.

Yup,. you get it, exactly! It's not a surveillance state, but don't be stupid, and certainly don't LEAN into it.

That may be sensible if you want or need stronger security and isolation.

However, many companies do support BYOD, especially on mobile where it's a pain to carry two phones around.

There is some support for this. For example, Apple supports dual Apple IDs and separate encrypted volumes for personal and corporate data. Microsoft apps (Outlook) also have some support for separating personal and corporate data.

The benefits of BYOD can include lower equipment costs, lower friction, and potentially higher employee happiness and productivity.

Mobile is a totally different story, to me. The security model allows them to be compartmentalized in the way a desktop never could be.

> How do I know which hardware is natively supported?

You buy preinstalled. Works for me.

Yeah preinstalled. And I never had issues with Ubuntu breaking in ways like arch or gentoo. Breaking includes trying to install some new thing or uograde and having random other stuff have to be googled.