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Especially the part where it's "looking for updates"! Sometimes lasts for minutes. What the hell. I wonder what's there to look for?

• mschuster91 4y ago
  Largely, that boils down to Windows never really having had a package manager like Linux distributions had, and not really an equivalent to the concept of "a file belongs to exactly one modular, versioned package". As a consequence, Windows has to check all of the files under its management if they are still the same as in the original installation or if they got touched by one of the dozens of Windows Update packages somewhen along the path, and if yes by which update package, and what that means for the compatibility between updates, and what effects that has in turn on the update installation order. Then it has to check for each potential update candidate if there is a localized version available, do a final check again if it actually can apply each update because some of these have conditional checks... oh, and some of the updates depend on Windows components being installed, so this has to be checked as well, oh and then it needs to trawl through the hot mess that is the database of drivers installed on the system and the hardware it has encountered, and to check if there are updates available for that. And at least the last time I looked (Win7 era) it also was possible to integrate MS Office and Visual Studio updates into the MS Update process, not sure if that's still the case today, but back then that also added to the discovery process. Windows is a hot mess of a lot of legacy garbage. Some of it got cleaned up a bit (e.g. refactoring stuff into components), but it's still nowhere near what almost all flavors of Linux sans buildroot offer.