the hot patch feature you mentioned is paid
On Windows, IIRC, you are blocked during the whole update process which can take several minutes.
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.
Funnily, dynamic updates support installation failed after all the kicking and screaming, and I didn't try. Maybe I'll look into it later.
I'd rather teach my parents to use Linux instead. Updates will be a breeze with 3±2 minutes of total background work without any interruption and 30 seconds of occasional downtime.
What I’m against is tolerating a bad OS design with more capable hardware and allowing Microsoft to worsen the experience. This is a pattern of Microsoft since forever.
Oh, that particular PC has no NVMe support anyway. I don’t know why that M.2 port is SATA only.
Especially when every other major OS can handle this more gracefully. I can version upgrade a fully loaded Debian installation in less than 6 minutes, reboot included, on a SATA disk, for example.
Also, while tangential, Windows providing the worst update experience, and calling Linux a major, mainstream OS superior in some ways feels unbelievable when I look back a decade.
In fact, they already figured out hotpatching and will sell it to you for server 2025.
Off topic, but I'm pretty sure that Ubuntu's livepatching is just kpatch under the hood,
No. Which OS is that ? Even to update Office they throw an annoying popup and then another one to start the update and a dark pattern (close button accesible with a hidden scrollbar and no window controls) one to tell you it is finished.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/blog/2025/04/...
Linux only requires rebooting for kernel updates, and with kpatch not even that.
My guess is they don't actually believe they have any competition, and therefore don't care to improve anything that doesn't also improve their bottom line.