Windows’ might be complex, but it is NOT graceful. If you have notepad open with unsaved text, then shutdown will never shut down - but nothing on the screen will make this obvious to a non-technical person.

Linux actually also has a graceful shutdown process. It tells apps its shutting down by sending SIGTERM, and its up to each process to flush data asap, do whatever they gotta do, and then shut down.

If they don’t listen then linux will indeed pull out the baseball bat chainsaw katana and make processes die whether they want to or not.

Almost every time I restart my Windows PC from an update, it sits on the “closing apps screen” or “restarting” screen then gives up completely and I have to force it to shut down/restart

And, just about every other time I restart with an update, it closes apps and then just fully shuts down after the update!

It’s super graceful! 😭

Fake news.

Both Windows and Linux have their respective SIGTERM and SIGKILL equivalents. And both usually try SIGTERM before resorting to SIGKILL. That’s what systemd’s dreaded “a stop job is running” is. It waits a minute or so for the SIGTERM to be honoured before SIGKILLing the offending process.