The immutable distro doesn't work for Windows most likely due to disk space. As someone who has informally supported a lot of Windows devices in enterprises it was surprising to me how many Windows problems are a result of running out of HD space and how often updates can't happen (the old fashion kind) simply because there isn't enough HD space for the update. I wouldn't be surprised if something like 5% of updates couldn't happen due to this.
Windows does do hotpatching, but there's a lot of things that aren't hotpatchable. Do you really think that Windows is like "naw, we could do zero reboot updates, but prefer not to because we are so dominant in the OS space"? This would be an incredible feature for the enterprise. In fact the enterprise version added a bunch of new hotpatch support just last year, but still requires quarterly updates and only does security updates. You really think that they did all that, but decided to not do the rest because they're comfy?
Again, I haven't seen Linux or Mac solve the problem fully either, nor iPhone or Android. AFAIK even every cloud provider has to do a reboot. Would Google or Amazon or Oracle have figured this out if it was so easy? How is it that there is no actual software engineer in industry that knows how to do this, but everyone on message forums seems to? Why don't these companies just hire people from message forums?
If disk space was the only thing preventing a much better update system, it would seem very trivial to just reserve a few extra gigabytes and do what Android does with compressed deltas that get applied which emulates A/B but with much less disk space usage (similar to non-A/B)
> Do you really think that Windows is like "naw, we could do zero reboot updates, but prefer not to because we are so dominant in the OS space"?
Microsoft has become complacent with Windows and I think there's no denying that. You need to look no further than the new right-click context menu they thought is acceptable to ship to a billion users. It's lacking half the functionality such as extensions, so they just decided to keep the old one behind "Show more options"? Or maybe no software engineer in the world could solve the infamous context menu 2.0 problem...
No operating system has fully solved every problem with updates, but many of them have solved many problems that Windows still continues to have. Zero reboot updates are probably impossible to do reliably but there are other ways to improve that aren't zero reboot updates. I don't claim to know the ins and outs of Windows and exactly how to implement better updates, but they could surely do better than what they're currently doing.
Windows does do hotpatching, but there's a lot of things that aren't hotpatchable. Do you really think that Windows is like "naw, we could do zero reboot updates, but prefer not to because we are so dominant in the OS space"? This would be an incredible feature for the enterprise. In fact the enterprise version added a bunch of new hotpatch support just last year, but still requires quarterly updates and only does security updates. You really think that they did all that, but decided to not do the rest because they're comfy?
Again, I haven't seen Linux or Mac solve the problem fully either, nor iPhone or Android. AFAIK even every cloud provider has to do a reboot. Would Google or Amazon or Oracle have figured this out if it was so easy? How is it that there is no actual software engineer in industry that knows how to do this, but everyone on message forums seems to? Why don't these companies just hire people from message forums?