Yes, I'm aware how Windows file locking works -- in fact you can sometimes rename running executables -- it depends.
Your solution to a rebooting the system being user-unfriendly is... restarting processes? How would that be so much more user-friendly? That's almost the same from a user standpoint, you might as well actually lock down the system and reboot to make sure the user doesn't try to mess with the system during the update.
And on top of all that, if you're actually willing to kill processes, then they won't be locking files anymore in the first place, so now you can update the files normally...
So yeah, I really don't understand how file locking is the actual problem here, despite Linux folks always trying to blame lack of live updates on that. I know I for one easily get errors after updating libraries on e.g. Ubuntu making programs or the desktop constantly crash until I reboot... if anything, that's far less user-friendly.
Not all applications need to restart, most updates will effect things that are not the running application (Office suite/webbrowser/game/whatever) ? Meanwhile your entire system has to restart.
"Most updates" won't affect running applications? What DLLs do you imagine "most updates" affect that are not in use by MS Office, Chrome, games, etc.? Pretty much everything I can imagine would be used all over the system, not merely coincidentally by desktop applications, but especially by desktop applications... if anything, it'd usually be the other way around, where some background services wouldn't need to be killed (because they sometimes only depend on a handful of DLLs), but many applications would (which can have insane dependency graphs). But both applications and background services also use IPC to interact with other processes (sometimes internally through Windows DLLs, not necessarily explicitly coded by them) which could well mean that they would need to be restarted if those processes need to be updated...
> What DLLs do you imagine "most updates" affect that are not in use by MS Office, Chrome, games, etc.?
Yeah, you can't update libc this way.
But outside of a short list of DLLs that are used by everything, files are mostly specific to a single program, and 90% of my programs are trivial to update by virtue of the fact that they aren't running.
And most of the background services on both linux and windows can be restarted transparently.
> But outside of a short list of DLLs that are used by everything, files are mostly specific to a single program, and 90% of my programs are trivial to update by virtue of the fact that they aren't running.
Are we talking about the same thing? We're talking about Windows updates, not Chrome updates or something. Windows doesn't force you to reboot when programs update themselves. It forces you to reboot when it updates itself. Which generally involves updating system DLLs that are used all over the place.
I don't think most updates touch those DLLs. Most have a modified date of my last reinstall. Some updates do, but a whole lot more could install without a restart if microsoft cared at all (like if it cost them ten cents).
Your solution to a rebooting the system being user-unfriendly is... restarting processes? How would that be so much more user-friendly? That's almost the same from a user standpoint, you might as well actually lock down the system and reboot to make sure the user doesn't try to mess with the system during the update.
And on top of all that, if you're actually willing to kill processes, then they won't be locking files anymore in the first place, so now you can update the files normally...
So yeah, I really don't understand how file locking is the actual problem here, despite Linux folks always trying to blame lack of live updates on that. I know I for one easily get errors after updating libraries on e.g. Ubuntu making programs or the desktop constantly crash until I reboot... if anything, that's far less user-friendly.