This is what I meant by my comment here.
Thats a hardware related annoyance that I've even seen on commercially distributed versions of Linux, and if it were set up correctly, you wouldn't have even noticed (aside from a bunch of scrolling text during the next boot when the new kernel was loaded). I had a client where they couldn't even get to the console of the server for this reason. Once set up correctly though, those updates have chugged away in the background... but I digress.
I'm assuming you (and your partner) have no trouble at all navigating around and using linux, it was the (poorly managed) update process that gave you headaches. I think that is a perfectly reasonable complaint.