Fedora decided this isn't super stable so they actually went and implemented something similar to Windows updates called Offline updates, where updates are performed after a reboot in a special mode where you can't do anything with your computer while it updates for like 10 minutes, but they give you an option to disable this and do instant updates like described above instead.
I think the most interesting innovation are immutable distros, which handle updates entirely differently. They will build an updated image while the system continues running and make it ready so that next reboot will just boot into the updated image. It avoids the partially-updated-system instability entirely and it also makes reverting a broken update instant and easy because you can just boot into the old image (there's usually at least two images). This exists in Fedora Silverblue (OSTree) and Vanilla OS (ABRoot) and AFAIK Android also followed this update pattern with A/B partitions (although they now iterated on this slightly to squeeze a few extra gigabytes out of storage).
I honestly don't know why Windows still sticks to their antiquated offline update system when better options exist and everyone always complains about the way they do updates and they have billions of dollars at their disposal, but I guess lack of any real competition to Windows in the PC operating system market has led to such stagnation
Windows does do hotpatching, but there's a lot of things that aren't hotpatchable. Do you really think that Windows is like "naw, we could do zero reboot updates, but prefer not to because we are so dominant in the OS space"? This would be an incredible feature for the enterprise. In fact the enterprise version added a bunch of new hotpatch support just last year, but still requires quarterly updates and only does security updates. You really think that they did all that, but decided to not do the rest because they're comfy?
Again, I haven't seen Linux or Mac solve the problem fully either, nor iPhone or Android. AFAIK even every cloud provider has to do a reboot. Would Google or Amazon or Oracle have figured this out if it was so easy? How is it that there is no actual software engineer in industry that knows how to do this, but everyone on message forums seems to? Why don't these companies just hire people from message forums?
> Do you really think that Windows is like "naw, we could do zero reboot updates, but prefer not to because we are so dominant in the OS space"?
Microsoft has become complacent with Windows and I think there's no denying that. You need to look no further than the new right-click context menu they thought is acceptable to ship to a billion users. It's lacking half the functionality such as extensions, so they just decided to keep the old one behind "Show more options"? Or maybe no software engineer in the world could solve the infamous context menu 2.0 problem...
No operating system has fully solved every problem with updates, but many of them have solved many problems that Windows still continues to have. Zero reboot updates are probably impossible to do reliably but there are other ways to improve that aren't zero reboot updates. I don't claim to know the ins and outs of Windows and exactly how to implement better updates, but they could surely do better than what they're currently doing.