I’m using the KDE version and updates come in automatically through Discover. They almost always announce in the system tray that a reboot is required.
It’s because it has offline updates enabled in Discover settings, its not a distro thing rather that Gnome and KDE have that in their software centers as a setting, and Fedora enables it by default, but it can be disabled.
It’s to make your system more stable because no packages get moved or updated during a running system causing unexpected behavior, and you also don’t have to reboot when it tells you, it’s more just a reminder that updates are waiting to be applied when you do, they could really word that better.
Not a bad idea really, if you update tons of stuff without rebooting if you have it disabled sometimes weird stuff can happen, but its not very common and usually not very bad at all. I’d leave it on if you want that extra little bit of stability, but if its just a regular every day use computer I think either way is fine.
sigh… i hate to say it but do your updates via command line because it will actually tell you if you need a reboot. As said above, it should only be for Kernel updates, and even then it will tell you that it will switch kernels next reboot and keep running on the current one.
Most desktop applications for doing updates ask you to reboot not because its needed, but because they are being “safe” or not running with the same user rights as you are in the terminal.
Hrm. Skim ahead if you already know some of this… So say you have a running program XYZ that loads libUseful.so to do useful things. Now you run some updates and libUseful.so gets replaced with the new version. Because of how files on Unix work, the old version still exists on the disk until XYZ closes it, but any new program will load the new version. So things generally “just work” when the system is updated in place, but on the rare occasion causes weird problems. Fedora (from the GUI) chooses to run updates during reboot to prevent the rare, weird problems. If you update from the command line, it just does them in place. Kernel updates always require a reboot to apply though.
After applying an update you need to make sure anything using the unmatched code is replaced by the patched code. A reliable way to do that is a reboot. Actually a reboot is pretty much the only reliable way to do that.
So I am not surprised that a distribution targeting end users asks for a reboot.
It has been a while since I have used Fedora but this is not unique to that distro. Arch will also tell you to reboot if the kernel, systemd, and a few other packages are updated. I rarely do it right away though.
I’m using the KDE version and updates come in automatically through Discover. They almost always announce in the system tray that a reboot is required.
It’s because it has offline updates enabled in Discover settings, its not a distro thing rather that Gnome and KDE have that in their software centers as a setting, and Fedora enables it by default, but it can be disabled.
It’s to make your system more stable because no packages get moved or updated during a running system causing unexpected behavior, and you also don’t have to reboot when it tells you, it’s more just a reminder that updates are waiting to be applied when you do, they could really word that better.
Interesting, I assumed I’d have to live with it… Would changing that setting be a bad idea?
Not a bad idea really, if you update tons of stuff without rebooting if you have it disabled sometimes weird stuff can happen, but its not very common and usually not very bad at all. I’d leave it on if you want that extra little bit of stability, but if its just a regular every day use computer I think either way is fine.
Well that was easy. Thank you very much, I may stick to Fedora for a while longer!
For anyone wondering, just edit
/etc/xdg/discoverrcand change the flag to “false”.Edit: looks like it can also be changed with a checkbox in system settings > software updates.
sigh… i hate to say it but do your updates via command line because it will actually tell you if you need a reboot. As said above, it should only be for Kernel updates, and even then it will tell you that it will switch kernels next reboot and keep running on the current one.
Most desktop applications for doing updates ask you to reboot not because its needed, but because they are being “safe” or not running with the same user rights as you are in the terminal.
Why does no other distro do that though? I’ve tried a bunch before and this is the first time I get that notification sitting there taunting me.
Hrm. Skim ahead if you already know some of this… So say you have a running program XYZ that loads libUseful.so to do useful things. Now you run some updates and libUseful.so gets replaced with the new version. Because of how files on Unix work, the old version still exists on the disk until XYZ closes it, but any new program will load the new version. So things generally “just work” when the system is updated in place, but on the rare occasion causes weird problems. Fedora (from the GUI) chooses to run updates during reboot to prevent the rare, weird problems. If you update from the command line, it just does them in place. Kernel updates always require a reboot to apply though.
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After applying an update you need to make sure anything using the unmatched code is replaced by the patched code. A reliable way to do that is a reboot. Actually a reboot is pretty much the only reliable way to do that.
So I am not surprised that a distribution targeting end users asks for a reboot.
It has been a while since I have used Fedora but this is not unique to that distro. Arch will also tell you to reboot if the kernel, systemd, and a few other packages are updated. I rarely do it right away though.
Do you have offline updates enabled in the Discover settings by any chance?