I set up an old MacBook Pro for my son a little while ago, which I finally gave to him today. I set up an old—but, compared to the Mac, far newer and far more powerful—Windows machine today for my daughter. Setting up my son’s Mac was a breeze. Nearly everything was downloaded via the Mac App Store, and I needed one reboot for a system update.

Setting up the Windows 11 machine took a lot more work. To be fair, it was, in one way, easier: almost all the software could be installed and updated on the command line via winget. Most of the updates were handled by one command: winget upgrade --all -h, which is close to the apt update and apt upgrade -y commands I use on my Ubuntu servers. Unfortunately, some packages would not update because reboots were needed, and Windows was very bad at explaining that to me.

Overall, it took about six reboots to get everything updated and to satisfy Windows Update. Sadly, the first time I booted into my daughter’s new account, which was just a few minutes ago, Windows Update requested a reboot immediately, so all the updates may not yet be done.

Overall, my experience Windows has gotten a lot better in the past few years, but it still lags behind the Mac and Linux in some important areas.