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Meme transcription: Anakin & Padme
[Panel 1] Anakin tries selects “Update and shut down” from the Windows start menu.
[Panel 2] Padme, labeled as “Windows”, cheerily says: ”You mean ‘Update and restart’, right?”
[Panel 3] Anakin takes an annoyed look.
[Panel 4] Padme, still cheery, says “I’ll just ‘Update and Restart’.”
On most distros you don't need to restart to update. Mint will just put an icon on the taskbar when updates are ready, and you can even tell it to just do it in the background. No restarts or shutdown warnings.
Don't kernel updates need a restart?
Yeah but no work has to be done during the restart, it's just booting into the new kernel.
Usually yes, but you'll never be forced or even nagged to restart. You could keep your computer going for months on the same kernel until you decide that it's time to reboot, at which point your computer will boot with the new kernel.
Yeah. GNOME does this probably because it's safer and ensures that the packages are downloaded in full before applying updates in an environment that is less likely for something to go wrong (Although I particularly don't know how true this is)
I'm guessing it's moreso that Gnome likes to make changes that can break things like extensions, and they probably don't hot swap shell components. The biggest reason you need to restart after Linux updates is that certain things are only loaded during the boot process (i.e. the kernel, initramfs, some boot or filesystem options) and can't easily be reloaded while the system is running. But you update something like dnsmasq, you probably just need to restart the service. At worst you need to reload the systemd daemon for config changes to take. And if you're just updating binaries, unless it's something like PAM that can also be not fun to restart and is constantly running, you probably don't need to do very much.
Firefox will occasionally act up if it's updated in the background while it's running. It detects this pretty quickly though and prompts you tobrestart thr browser when you open a new tab. That's just about the only app I've had issues with though.