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On Monday, 22 May 2023 13:07:00 BST David Bell wrote: > > Why do Windows and Apple updates take so long to install, whilst GNU > Linux take only a few seconds? Old question, but just saw it. There are various reasons, I wouldn't pretend to know them all. Apple updates tend to be large, they tend to batch together a lot of changes, and install them all at once (they can do small fixes, but that is I believe (some doubt here) strictly a security channel thing e.g. stop the worm). So there is often a lot to install/reinstall. They still seem slow allowing for size, so I don't know what else is slowing them down. Windows is a bit of a mystery. The answer you got that Windows keeps old copies (and checkpoints) can only be partial as it was pig slow before the check pointing was introduced. I know some Windows updates used to do scans of the disks for other copies of DLLs and weird stuff like that. It also explicitly registers DLL which is a process that is a little slower than the shared library link behaviour on Linux. It used to do some weird file locking stuff but I think that is long gone. So I suspect simply maintaining all the different types of metadata it has is the big impact. There was a lot of debate between RPM and DPKG over the transactional nature of software updates in the Linux world at one point. One was much faster but sloppier in committing to disk and rolling back, I forget which way around (I think RPM was more pedantic), in the era of SSDs this is largely moot I suspect. I suspect the primary reason is it is someone else's problem, it doesn't cost Microsoft any more if it takes you a long time to install updates. Recent conferences where Microsoft allegedly demonstrated everything using Mac and Linux with no Windows aside, I understand Microsoft is a large user of Windows, so this might not be quite fair characterisation. Probably it is a different bit of a large company and they are the only ones who can fix it, whereas if you think dpkg is slow you can hack away today and improve it. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG FAQ: https://www.dcglug.org.uk/faq/