I have been daily driving a dual booted laptop for the past two years. After a year of distro hopping I settled with fedora + kde and never looked back. I really liked the auto nvidia driver config and it made everything so pleasant to work. Since the last 8 or 9 months I decided to do gaming using bottles and proton ge. I cannot afford to buy games and bottles is a God send at that. Now I realized that I had not logged into my windows partition in over 6 months. So I logged in to check and it told me it needs to download 8 gigs of updates. That sent me into rage and so clean installed everything to be fedora. I have 250 gb of storage locked in limbo because of windows( I have a 512 gb ssd so it was a lot) and today after everything was setup, the os took only around 20gb minus the games. Never felt happier.
I get about 4GB of updates twice a month, with a couple gigabytes of updates every week or so because of Nvidia and Flatpak. That’s Manjaro, though.
Fedora slowly trickles their updates into your system, but I don’t think it’s much smaller. You’ll get small updates every day rather than huge updates every month.
Not saying your switch to Linux was bad or anything, but maybe temper your expectations.
It wasn’t the fact that I got updates that bothered me. It’s the fact that this update will take up more space on my disk and not replace previously occupied 8 gb that irked me. Some how, the space occupied by windows jut keeps on increasing.
Windows keeps update files around fir quick reverts. If you use automatic BTRFS snapshots, you’ll see a similar effect, though those snapshots are stored in the file system rather than encoded in a WinSxS folder. I believe the standard cleanup timeout is about 30 days, but it’s been a while since I used Windows.
These diffs are especially big on full version upgrades (i.e. the update to 22H2) which aren’t given that much special attention I the update UI but are very much like an upgrade from Fedora 38 to Fedora 39, or Ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04. It probably doesn’t help that Windows explorer doesn’t understand hard links, so Windows Explorer will claim the Windows folder will take up several times the real size on disk while the hard links are all over the place.
The worst part is that even Microsoft’s own cleanup tools get confused and remove too many of these files. I’ve had to do system restore because cleanmgr decided to remove 10GB of “old Windows Update files” that turned out not to be old enough to just remove. I may prefer Microsoft’s solution to DLL hell over Linux’s because old stuff will work for longer, but if their own software can’t deal with the resolving complexity, maybe they should take a step back and figure out how to make their solution stable.
This is why I stay away from Flatpack and Snap (and anything node or Electron). If I get a gig with my weevly Arch update, I think it’s a lot.
Can’t avoid it with some programs, but if there are options, there’s a set of technologies I avoid like the plague.
The Flatpak issue is specifically because of distributions technicalities related to the proprietary driver. On AMD or Intel this isn’t a problem at all, in fact the block based update mechanism is much more efficient than most distro updates. It’s rather annoying, ur I believe it’s being worked on by the Flatpak devs.
Manjaro chooses to keep software back for a while, so multiple weeks of major updates all come at once. Add to that CUDA, the Nvidia Docker container, and LaTeX, and you easily get multiple gigabytes per update. It’s not really a problem in the age of terabyte SSDs and gigabit internet, even if it does feel quite pointless.
I’ve never really had many issues with Electron on Arch based distros. Arch packages most Electron applications as the required bits for a single Electron package that gets updated individually. On all other distros, Electron does waste a lot of space, though.
What blows my mind about windows updates is just how long they take to actually install. It’s not even the reboots that bother me. Just the sheer time frames.
Yeah, that’s always puzzled me as well. Part of the reason is that Windows does a lot more than your average Linux distro, and another part is probably that Linux lacks proper antivirus, but even then Windows Update has always seemed weirdly inefficient to me. It seems to be stuck diffing/decompressing on a single core, barely hitting the SSD until it does everything at once.