It's simply hilarious to see Windows Update force rebooting machines in the middle of professional games.
Basically, a computer running Windows is actually owned by the Microsoft overlord who can do whatever the hell it wants to do. Occasionally it allows you to use the computer at its mercy.
MSFT upgrades are a joke. I worked at MS and the number of times a machine decides to restart in the middle of a presentation is not even funny. This was in the windows department.
It seems the decision was forced down by management. I hope someone up the chain realizes how much its cost to the actual users.
There was a joke at MSFT "you don't become a VP without making the company lose a billion dollars"
I love GNU/Linux and I love bashing Windows but I remember a time not even ten years ago that people (better at computers than I am) would not dare run apt-get upgrade before a presentation.
I think it still applies today.
Personally, I don't understand computers well so thus might be misguided but what I want is something similar to se Linux or jails but every application stack lives on its own and does not share libraries with anyone else. The idea us upgrading one application should not break another.
There's a lot of prior art and stuff existing along those lines. Plan 9 allowed every process to have its own /proc filesystem separate from the global one, and could give out per-process references to hardware devices too. Illumos implemented the Linux kernel's interface so you can run binaries built for GNU/Linux inside a secure Zone. (MS implemented something similar so it's nice you can run bash natively in Win10 now, but there's no security in that...) Guix/NixOS have a package management system with atomic upgrades and rollbacks that should never lead to a borked system. Dependency management is crucial since you can isolate all you want -- build an OS where every application is its own docker image if you want -- but as soon as things want to talk to each other, if you don't account for API changes on that communication channel you will have a broken system.
But can any of it overcome worse-is-better? Are these things really that desirable for a personal computer or are they more suited to production servers? I've been using Gentoo as my main OS since 2007, on my current rig that I put together in 2009, and I wouldn't be that surprised if I'm still using it in 2027. Even knowing about other systems' advances I'm still using my own preferred set of compromises.
Basically, a computer running Windows is actually owned by the Microsoft overlord who can do whatever the hell it wants to do. Occasionally it allows you to use the computer at its mercy.