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by vetinari 3070 days ago
> Speaking of which, why do so many things require reboot to update on Windows?

We are getting there on Linux too - with atomic or image based updates of the underlying system. On servers you will (or already) have A/B partitions (or ostrees), on mobiles and IoT too, some desktops (looking at Fedora) also prefer reboot-update-reboot cycle, to prevent things like killing X while doing your update and leaving your machine in inconsistent state.

macOS also does system updates with reboot, for the same reasons.
2 comments
Aissen 3069 days ago
It's a miracle that reboot-less updates mostly work in Linux. You need to restart services, etc. to make sure they have the latest libs. Gnome3+systemd does that now:

https://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/2012/06/04/offline-os-update...

https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/SystemUpda...

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/OfflineSystemUpdates

It's still much faster than a Windows update (at least on my SSD system).

link
garblegarble 3069 days ago
>macOS also does system updates with reboot, for the same reasons.

And speaking from experience, the recent macOS way of applying an update is absolutely insane - on my Macbook Pro (with the stock SSD with 3GB/sec read and 2GB/sec of write) a small system update can take 10+ minutes to install

link