Sep 092017
I recently switched from Ubuntu to Fedora Core for a variety of reasons :-
- For a later version of fwupd as I had some vulnerable wireless mice to update.
- To have a look at what Wayland was like (mostly invisible although oddball Window Managers still only talk to X).
- To have a look at what it’s like after all these years; RedHat was one of the early distributions I ran.
All is reasonable except for one thing. The software updates.
What is this obsession with restarting to perform software updates? Is the relevant developer a refugee from Windows?
Now don’t get me wrong; a restart is the most effective simple way to ensure that outdated versions are not in use, but restarting every time you perform an update seems excessive.
- If you need to update the kernel for security reasons, a restart is reasonable if you don’t have “live upgrades” but Fedora Core comes with a kernel that has that feature.
- If you have a security update to a long-running process (such as Wayland or X), then you need to restart that process. In some cases you can restart a long-running process without notice; in others you will have to be disruptive, or ask someone to quit the long-running process.
- If it isn’t a security update, you can simply wait until the user restarts the process.
Overall, the update process need not be as disruptive as Fedora Core makes it. It is of course not the end of the world to force a reboot, but it is hardly a very graceful process and some (including me) will find it annoying enough to avoid Fedora Core.
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