Unless you're updating the kernel itself, there is little chance you actually need to reboot your machine. Just restarting whatever service or application you're using should do the trick.
You do you, it can't hurt to reboot and work on a fresh restart. But if for some reasons you need to keep your machine up, you'll know it is less of a problem than on windows typically
This is the same on Windows, you can just carry on and then complete an update when you go to shut down the machine. Can't remember the last time an app install or update required the whole OS to be restarted immediately.
I remember what it's called, but at some point there was an app for windows that would check if your machine actually needed a restart or not. Basically the "restart your machine" prompt is mostly just a boilerplate. It's very rare that those installers touch anything that can't actually be loaded without a restart.
I tried installing rust which required some Visual Studio compiler on a Windows machine configured to reset itself when rebooted. It decided I needed a reboot. I'm glad I didn't have unsaved files…
Needless to say I could not run my program on that machine. Why does it need a reboot? I don't know. It's just meant to be a compiler.
Been running endeavouros for over a year on two machines. The only time I couldn't boot was when the Nvidia drivers decided not to work with the LTS kernel anymore. So I just started the normal kernel and changed that to the default in my boot manager. This is the only issue I've had with it and it's arch based. I really don't understand the bad reputation.
Also the arch wiki is applicable to most distros with only slight changes.
Honest question, as I usually just restart to be sure I haven't missed to restart a service or something, but theoretically I could restart every program and service, that got updated.
Arch is on the bleeding edge and it doesn't ask for a reboot. I think it asks for a reboot to load the kernel parts that have updated. Arch probably just assumes you'll do it eventually, but if you don't it'll just keep running the current kernel.
Afaik mint just says you have to restart but don't forces you. Iirc it was there to avoud any glitches which could be caused by apps interacting with each other in different versions(say some system app got updated and desktop environment is still the old since its loaded before update then cause gui mismatch due to different versions of ui toolkit)
I mean, in this case Windows doesn't force you to restart either, you can just keep chugging along with the restart icon set the bottom right... That icon can stay there for weeks on my girlfriend's laptop
But that is update and restart. The update is not at all installed and will only install if you restart. And it takes a lot of time. But here it is already installed and you can actually reopen apps ti get them in the updated state
Yep. I'm on EndeavourOS which is about as far as you can get from Mint without going to like Slackware, LFS, or BSD. Basically every single run of pacman prompts for a reboot. I'm sure I could restart individual services or subsystems instead, but that's not what the OS popup says.
Depends on your kernel, the distro kernel, and your package manager settings. One of the biggest selling points for Redhat is the live patch kernel updates with zero down time. However, Redhat is the original Linux distro and their devs do a lot of the kernel code maintenance and development.
Redhat is not the original. Just of the ongoing projects, there is both Slackware and Debian, which are both older than Redhat. Redhat stands out because they are a commercial, for profit company, so they have more money and resources to invest in Linux development than most organizations, and they have a vested interest since it is their product base.