IIRC on newer versions of the OS, updates are applied on a separate partition without interrupting you. I don't know if it causes performance loss during that time, so far it has been seemless for me but I don't have updates everyday either .. Only when the update completes will the OS asks you to reboot so it can start from that new version.
Sure it uses a ton of storage to do things this way, but it is very secure and pleasant to use.
Ubuntu also completely blows itself up into an unbootable state at least once a year after updates.
Windows Update and testing suck, but Linux package management and upgrading suck just as badly. Systemd upgrade bugs seem to cause the most un-bootable systems in my experience, with alarming frequency, even on LTS servers that see little churn.
and on servers (20+ VMs and a few hypervisors, some LTS some not) I had even fewer problems. for me things got especially smooth sailing after ubuntu switched to systemd.
The seamless updates feature originally came from Chrome OS. It's easily one of the best features of that OS.
https://www.xda-developers.com/how-a-b-partitions-and-seamle...
Fun fact: The Android update_engine which handles seamless updates is basically ripped straight from Chrome OS. Only recently were strings containing "Chrome OS" removed from update_engine’s log to avoid confusion for anyone who happens to check logcat.
I have often wondered if Microsoft could use this type of system for Windows 10? Not only would it make the update process more reliable, but faster too (especially when it comes to feature updates).
The other thing Microsoft should sort out is WSUS. It is such a flaky system!
From what I understand this isn't far from what Windows 10 does? Windows doesn't use a separate physical partition because it can't trust any specific OEM or user to follow a specific partition scheme, so it uses something more of a "virtual" overlay in NTFS for big Windows changes, based on how I understand it. It's something like a partition scheme in that it virtualizes entire directories (like C:\Windows) and then swaps them. For dumb backwards compatibility reasons, Windows can't just assume that it can just outright swap one C:\Windows directory for another one, so supposedly a lot of the time in major updates is stuff like inventorying directories like C:\Windows for non-Windows stuff and copying it across to the new pseudo-partition before the swap.
And JunOS (the juniper network appliance operating system based on freebsd.) has had this since version 10.4 which was released in 2010.