Yeah exactly ... I want Windows running in Linux, not the other way around, so I actually control the software and the updates!

I actually just tried WINE for the FIRST time (surprisingly, I have been out of the Windows world for so long)

https://www.winehq.org/

And as long as I installed the binaries from their repo, not Debian 12, it worked very well

Wine is an impressive project too. It's not a VM, which has upsides and downsides, but I was able to run GCC-TDM, Python 3, and git bash in it!

What do you mean by that?

As a reply to: You don't have to stress "do I update my OS?"

I'm also not sure on your question, over the last 5 years, average interruption time is ~ 5 minutes to apply update, which happens roughly once a 3 weeks or so. Once or twice per year, release updates happen and that takes may be 30 minutes of interruption (not totally sure here as I usually grab my coffee and cigarrets and go reading news on balcony, which may easily take ~1h for me).

So for me, updates practically doesn't affect my workflow at all.

Congrats. I'm linux desktop user, still had to waste hours of time nursing miscellaneously recalcitrant windows updates that annoyed people around.

I'm genially intrigued, how to achieve this, assuming you are on standard Windows Defender setup, not some 3 AV/DLP tools working at the same time on system.

My setup/config has NOTHING special usually - got laptop(s), start bundled Windows (10/11) Pro, run "reset this PC" to ensure fresh like install, use for several years. No magical steps involved or whatever "bloatware cleanup" people do.

Having had this conversation with Linux users 100x, I've come to the conclusion that some people are just cursed. Me, I use Windows and have never run into the kind of boondoggles that they swear were common occurrences for them: Drivers breaking on update, BSODs, two-hour-long-forced-updates, etc. etc. It just... never happens. Maybe I'm the one that's blessed.