Comment 11 for bug 39146

This is fixed in R. The redesigned Software Updater tells you in advance if any of the selected updates have flagged that they will need a restart to finish installing. And if you expand the dialog to reveal the list of updates, it contains a column with an icon for exactly which updates require a restart. If any update requires a restart but does not tell you in advance, please report a bug on that package and tag it "xb-restart-required". <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs?field.tag=xb-restart-required>

If you don't want updates ever to require a restart to finish installing, then work to get KSplice or equivalent integrated into every kernel, glibc, and similar Ubuntu update. It isn't a "Windows ... clone" thing, it's an operating system architecture thing.