Last week, I was listening to the WAN show of Linus Tech Tips, and Luke talked about his experience of using Linux (Ubuntu LTS) on his work computer. He described the harrowing experience of running updates in the background, and then experiencing a hard crash that bricked his machine.
Now, luckily for us, Fedora Linux has a remedy against that since 2012; Offline Updates. Simply put, the system downloads the updates and then it restarts itself into a save-mode, where it can install the updates and then restart again. This prevents instabilities that can cause serious crashes.
Sadly, going through Reddit, and the discussions that followed Lukeās story, very few people actually seem to understand the importance of offline updates. Just this morning, Jupiter Broadcasting was discussing some of their Linux-grievances. One prominent thing that one of the speakers mentioned, was how Firefox can just randomly ask to be restarted. So people within the Linux world, both old and new, donāt seem to fully understand this.
So, letās try to make some things clear using an article on Fedora Magazine.
Outline
- Offline Updates
- How it works
- Why itās important
- Where it comes from
- Updating a live system
- Nothing bad happens
- Firefox needs a restart
- System crash
- System brick
- Conclusion
In the first part, I want to explain what it is and why itās important. In the second part, I want to use common āissuesā as an example of this problem in action. Firefox is a very good application for this, since almost every Linux user I ever talked to has experienced the āFirefox must restartā message.
Discussion
I think this could be a shorter article, and Iāll make sure to link to some detailed articles about the techniques behind the scene (systemd and Policy-Kit) but I do think that this could be an article for all ages, an technically speaking itās not ever very Fedora related.