FTA: “Microsoft says that Windows devices need to be online for at least eight hours to get the latest updates and have them correctly installed after they're released through Windows Update.”
I think you can also read that as “after we release an update, it can take 8 hours for it to get to all machines needing it”
I guess the X million Windows installs poll Microsoft servers for updates at (somewhat) fixed times that, to even out load on their update servers, vary by machine during the day.
Possibly still less than ideal (couldn’t a machine that sees it has been offline for X hours poll the moment it’s connected to a network?), but not _that_ weird.
Compare that to Arch Linux on 100MBit connection
To update reliably, it requires between 10 seconds daily, 1 minute weekly to about 5 minutes monthly internet access.
That reminds me how Ubuntu's release upgrader says that an update will take x days on a 56kbps modem (or was it 1Mbps connection, something very slow) as a "relatable" estimation on how long the update will take.
It's worse than that, because updating a Linux system is updating ~every application on your computer, not just the operating system. If you were just updating the core system, it would likely be even faster than that!
On Arch, installing new kernel releases takes like maybe a minute including download time and reloading the kernel modules. At least on my 1 Gbps internet. And I'm not locked out of my own system while it does so. It baffles me how Windows could possibly be so slow.
The wording is fascinating; it reads like this is a natural law that Microsoft has discovered through experimentation, rather than, like, a major bug that they should fix ASAP.
> Approximately 50% of devices not on a serviced build of Windows 10 do not meet the minimum Update Connectivity measurement.
> Approximately 25% of Windows 10 devices on a serviced build but have security updates that are more than 60 days out of date have less than the minimum Update Connectivity.
Are these numbers not huge?
Obviously somebody should have made certain since the beginning that previous connectivity status should not come close to becoming a show-stopper if updates are to be considered important.
"When troubleshooting update issues, we have found it is best to select devices that have sufficient Update Connectivity," Guyer added.
Wait a minute aren't the other users the ones that need the troubleshooting more than anyone else?
And Microsoft is nowhere near being able to help users having the easier-to-solve problem yet either?
"If a device has insufficient Update Connectivity, then investigating other update issues is complicated because the low Update Connectivity can create new issues that go away once there's enough connectivity."
It's not too late to fix this with proper engineering, these issues which are not supposed to be there are exactly what need to go away regardless of total connection hours.
The sense I get from the way they’re describing it is that they don’t understand how the update system works at all, and are treating it as a black box… It’s a really odd way to talk about one’s own system.
