- HEADLINE: All updates reboot-free
- DESCRIPTION: Short of a major-version update, the software updater should never ask me "Please restart the computer to begin using your updated software" again.
I'm already using the "Canonical Livepatch Service" - but I still get asked to reboot much more often than I would like.
- ROLE/AFFILIATION: Programmer
If it is a system library, then for the apps to use the newly installed library, they need to be restarted (sometimes logging out and logging in again should be enough).
If that library is the system "libc" library or something similar, then it has to be reboot (not relogin). The only way that I can think for reboot-free updates, is to save the full state of the system, then silently restart everything to the previous state.
Restarting running services and logging in again is fully sufficient to handle a libc upgrade, at the very least on Debian. "Just restart" is maybe easier advice to give, but overshoots the target a little bit.
GNU/Linux is not Windows 95.
Is it still a thing ? I've been using Linux Mint (which is based on Ubuntu for updates) and I haven't been asked to reboot my computer in years !