10 hours a week to deal with patches?

If the PC reboots with your work unsaved, you could lose a day's work, for example.

You have a day's worth of unsaved work?

Not really your place to judge is it? What if they are in the middle of a long running task and the machine shuts down? Maybe it takes all day to run that process intensive task? Boom updates reboot the machine and a whole day's processing was lost. It is the users' prerogative on how they want to use their machine (poor software design choices and all) and if they don't want to take an automatic update and reboot then so be it. Or what if some people like to wait a couple weeks and see if Microsoft accidentally breaks something major with an update... pretty sure that has happened before.

Lost a 3d print because of windows update.

Switched to Octopi after that.

If this happens every week and you haven't done anything about it, well...

It only has to happen once.

Besides which, a predictable failure is still a failure. By your logic, Win95 crashing several times a week wasn't a problem either.

Win95 crashing several times a week was a feature that would let you get away with not seeing this other bug: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/216641

This thread is predicated on the assertion that users lose 10 or even 20 hours per week to reboots. Not just once.

In my case, I started a simulation running overnight. The next day I found that Windows had rebooted to install a patch and killed my simulation. (I'm now using a Mac.)

Hit that Ctrl-S now.

And in 5 minutes.

And 5 minutes after that.

Repeat until you stop working today.

Hit Ctrl-S every start of the day after 5 minutes of work.

And 5 minutes after that.

Repeat until you stop working that day.

There you go. Saved you a lot of hours of work.

We're power users. We've already been burned by this, and we know how to defend against it.

That doesn't help my mom when she's writing a long letter and (rightly) expects her computer's RAM to hold the information and warn her before it does anything destructive. That doesn't help the middle-schooler who is suffering through their first 5-page essay.

Use an OS that behaves in a way I like more.

Save when convenient.

Repeat as necessary.

I prefer to use software that behaves the way I want it to, rather than modifying my own behavior to work around its shortcomings.