>That is one of the reasons.
That's the primary reason as I've been told by former MSFT employees.
> But free as in beer, when you also take into account things like support, doesn't exist.
Support exists, red hat and other foundations.
>On a SSD? Very unlikely, unless you're upgrading to a major version. True, Microsoft could make most of these updates being applied whilst OS is still online.
I just upgraded 6 systems over Christmas, every one to SSD, all running core i5/i7 with more than 8gb ram. Yes, 30-60 minutes for the fall creators update on half of them, one of them took 2 hours to finish other updates.
>You can schedule these reboots if you got Pro. macOS also sometimes needs to reboot btw. My Android reboots every week (LOS) for new firmware.
Once in a while I need to reboot osx or linux for a kernel update or other deep system update. Every time I need to reboot windows. The difference is staggering and in no way does the occasional restart from linux compare to windows. To pretend they're even in the same league is ridiculous. Windows 10 barely fixed that by moving a features to apps.
>Depends if you view it from the eyes of a power user or a casual user. The non-technical user just wants something which works ie. a good UI. App Store and Play Store provide that. Those non-technical users don't give a rat about features like "get packages from these sources, not those, blacklist this version".
Reasonable point, however non-technical users do want to be able to find their software. Microsofts store sucks compared to apple and androids from my experience, and the vast majority of non-technical users still don't use it for many/most of their software installs from numbers I've seen. That may be changing, i'm not sure the trends. My point was in linux, you're advanced enough to use the package manager and you probably know how to add sources as a casual user. In microsoft its a walled garden, and a shitty garden.
Beyond that, casual users don't want to be spied on, just because they aren't technical enough to understand whats happening and the implications does not mean microsoft should just get a 'pass' on making it difficult/impossible to disable spying on their users. This is, if anything, significantly worse if you're looking at it primarily from the casual user side which you seem to insist on.