this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2026
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"I enrolled my laptop into Windows 11 Insiders Program that delivers updates on a more frequent basis, turned it off for half a year and then got mad that I missed a bunch of updates, so I decided to sit there and mash the update button to constantly ping for updates instead of doing literally anything else while it's updating, because I wanted to run tests and had to be fully up-to-date."
Microslop got a lot of issues, but this is fucking ridiculous, the author sounds insufferable.
"But who in the temple is going to sit there for 10 minutes or more while this downloads new updates and reboots?"
Oh, idk, people who don't enroll themselves into a faster paced update cycle.
"And may the gods help you if you buy a brand new PC that's been sitting on a shelf for months or years. You might have hours of updates after you first take it out of the box."
I don't know a single piece of electronic that doesn't require updating after purchasing. Hours, though? Is this guy on a 10kbps connection or where is this fantasy coming from?
This has nothing to do with the insider program though. They mentioned it because it makes the situation even worse just because of the large number of updates. I've had the same thing happen to me multiple times on my windows 10 copy that is not enrolled in the insider program.
No, it's slow regardless of your connection. That's because you're stuck in a loop of:
For reference, I've updated arch linux setups after many months of not using them and the process takes ~10 mins at worst, and that's an OS that assumes you update it regularly. You can probably do an entire major release update on debian/ubuntu in the same time that windows takes to install ~6 months of regular updates. It's inexcusable and it's pretty clear that windows doesn't give a shit for anyone that doesn't use it daily, which is exactly the point the article is making.
I'm on Fedora and for me it is as simple as
sudo dnf upgrade --refresh -y, Come back in 5 minutes and manually restart.There is no babysitting required. You can see the realtime progress of the entire process if you want to. It does not need reboots to install other updates. The updates don't refuse to install if you've removed Edge Browser or any other 'necessary' (BS) software.
I've had Windows installed on the same machine since 8 through 11. Not even a full reinstall ever took longer than 20min at most, counting the downloads. 11 updates roughly once a month, sometimes 2-3 smaller updates a month if there were some issues, sometimes it can go a month without anything, and I had the "get updates first" ticked in the settings. Every single time it estimates a 4min update and it never takes longer than that. Not once did I have any of the issues you listed. Not sitting on some crazy new hardware either, an 11 years old SATA SSD and an ok internet. I very rarely skipped updates on my PC, but I did once update a very old laptop and it took 30min only because it had a measly 8GB of RAM and an HDD.
I'm now on Cachy and I do update every day or multiple times a day, but I wouldn't go on a rant if I missed half a year worth of updates and then had to wait some time for it to install. In half a year, even slow distros had a major update. And I simply do not buy that anyone outside of HDD and unstable internet users had to wait more than 1h at absolute worst to install a half a year load of updates.
How is this unreasonable? What is Windows supposed to do? Personally come to your house to ensure you are still getting updated? You don't even have to use it daily, as the author said - they chose to stare at the update button (which again I don't even understand the point of anyway, Windows won't magically offer you more updates if you click it more times, this is the same logic as clicking the pedestrian push button more than once), which means for regular users the updates would've installed in the background or outside of working hours and they wouldn't even notice.
Correctly report that there are pending updates when there are?
Download them in one batch, requiring only one restart?
Download and install them at a reasonable speed on my 1Mbps connection and SSD?
Apparently from the comments here this doesn't affect everyone. If you don't believe that this can happen to anyone because it doesn't happen to you, I'm not interested in convincing you.
An W11 update in February took my work computer 1 hour to update, even Windows put "estimated 50 mins" on the Windows Update screen. Decently fast processor, 16GB RAM and SSD.
I think our IT manager paused updates for everyone in late January because of all the issues it was causing, then that Friday afternoon I walked around the office and saw a bunch of people taking a "second lunch" because their computer was in the process of updating Windows.
My Windows 11 laptop was about an hour of updates when I first got it.
Which is fine, I'm pretty sure I went and made dinner while it was doing that, it's not like you're required to actually do anything for that to happen.
Well, to be fair Windows is a paid product and as such one would expect excellent ergonomics, including an if statement checking whether the current system is close enough to the latest update before starting the process without query.