Comment by js2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by js2 | Hacker News Reader

I was at my CPA the other day. One of her two monitors went blank due to a h/w issue and so per instructions from her IT guy she had to reboot. Windows decided it had to apply updates as part of the shutdown sequence and she was unable to decline. So we had to sit there and wait 5 minutes for it to apply the updates, then reboot. (Maybe there's a way to override applying the updates and yes, she should get her second monitor fixed. I'm her client, not her IT person, so I wasn't going to intervene. And we had a nice conversation while waiting, so there's that.)

FTR, macOS has also become increasingly annoying with how it applies updates, and my iOS devices never seem to auto update at night like they're supposed to. As in industry, we suck at this. Is Linux the only OS making an effort at patching without rebooting? And does it actually work?

https://linux-audit.com/livepatch-linux-kernel-updates-witho...

> and my iOS devices never seem to auto update at night like they're supposed to

Do they have alarms set? For whatever weird reason there's no way to get it to auto-update overnight if there's an alarm.

I mean, isn't that a reasonable default? If you use a 3rd party alarm client, such as a sleep monitor, then you'd lose that alarm upon reboot.

I imagine they'd rather you go unpatched than run the risk of not waking you up for an appointment?

No alarms set. Plugged in, on Wi-Fi.

Upgrades can occur on Linux at any time, or never. It depends when the cronjob is scheduled.

The other nice thing is only limited things require reboots. You can find that out by

"needs-restarting -r"

If you're being tricky, you can parse that and insert a "shutdown -h $TIME" if you parse needs-restarting as yes.

I'm not using live patches. But I can tell you, it doesn't matter if it works 100%. Because there're very few updates that force you to reboot your computer. So if there is kernel update once in a while, I'm ok with rebooting my pc. As files has been already updated in the background, it's really just a reboot. Not like in Windows, which actually start the update process as part of the boot, make your pc unusable for quite long time.

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