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> And neither can Linux, contrary to popular belief. Anything that involves system services or god forbid the kernel requires a reboot. That is not true at all
by commoner 3y ago
> And neither can Linux, contrary to popular belief. Anything that involves system services or god forbid the kernel requires a reboot.
That is not true at all, and anyone can confirm this by upgrading the kernel and system services (e.g. desktop environment, display manager, systemd) on Arch Linux and verifying that just about everything continues to work normally. In my experience, the only things that require a reboot are a few particular kernel modules (such as the VirtualBox host modules) and only if you are going to use those modules. Even in that case, it is still your choice whether you want to reboot.
- formerly_proven 3y agoGnome, KDE and also Firefox and Chrome don't seem to be particularly fond of updates being applied under their ass, probably because they are heavy on dynamic code loading and spawning workers with unstable APIs, respectively. Firefox even added some code to detect this and show a blank page with "You gotta restart Firefox before you can open new tabs" instead of crashing. Edit: Another classic is upgrading the kernel on Arch, not rebooting, then trying to use a thumb drive for the first time since the last boot. Since Arch uses one package for all kernel versions, only one set of loadable modules is installed per kernel package - so upgrading the package removes the loadable modules of the currently running kernel.
- commoner 3y agoI do restart browsers after upgrading them, but that's different from restarting Linux. For desktop environments, I usually don't bother rebooting Linux for anything other than major releases (like GNOME 43/44 and Plasma 5.26/5.27) since most of the minor releases don't make enough of a difference in day to day use to interrupt what I'm doing.