The ability to update whenever I feel like it and not whenever Windows felt like it, is one of the nicest things about Linux these days. Sure, you can disable automatic updates on Windows, but it's clunky and never stuck for me. After some major update, that setting is reset, and you're back to automatic updates. The system is dishonest and hostile to you from the start.

Meanwhile, Mint's update manager has a tickbox which just disables automatic updates, and let's you schedule them if you want that. And if you just tick that box, it'll never get unticked, and you can go about your life, even opting to not update certain packages if you don't want them. It's your computer, so do what you want. No 'I'm altering the deal' shenanigans or coming back to your PC with it at the login screen and a 'we decided you need more AI in your life' full screen message since an update was pushed while you were gone.

I get why this happened. Microsoft started to force automatic updates since Grandma and everybody else would just end up never manually updating their PC, and thus got pwned. So they took the sledgehammer approach instead and started forcing updates from that happening. But the fact that updates constantly mess with the UI and even end up removing features, it's not like people don't have good reasons to be mad. If it were only security updates that were forced, I doubt that the cultural phenomenon of 'fuck updates' would even exist.