Hello everyone! I am using the Cinnamon Spin of Fedora 30 and I recently replaced DnfDragora with the GNOME Software center. I’ve run into something unusual, GNOME software wants me to restart to install updates. I know for a fact that a reboot is not required to install updates in any Linux Distro.…

The basic point is this: updates without reboots can be unpredictable. Yes, in many cases a single service can be restarted and the system can continue to function. However, there are plenty of cases where this is not true. One example is when a low-level library is updated. There’s really no way to…

In fact reboot is required in some scenarios. For example, some library your init system depends on is updated. In order to load newer version of that library easiest way is to reboot. Same goes for kernel. Though, I have noticed as well that Gnome software is reboot happy and prompts for reboot qu…

[image] masteroman: Saying restart service would confuse many, mainly new or unexperienced users. Is that specific to Gnome Software? sudo dnf update restarts services without prompting the user, so it’s unclear to me why any updater would be limited from doing so as well. [image] mastero…

I see you know your way around quite well :slight_smile: Somebody that knows underpinnings of Gnome Software better than me might correct me or shed some more light on the situation, but Gnome software itself is in the background using something called PackageKit which is not exactly the same as dn…

That’s my experience as well. When I get a notification from Gnome Software that there are updates to be installed, I just open a terminal and run sudo dnf update. That usually works well enough, and if there’s a kernel upgrade, I can decide when to reboot. However, I have noticed in the past, tha…

[image] fasulia: Is that specific to Gnome Software? sudo dnf update restarts services without prompting the user, so it’s unclear to me why any updater would be limited from doing so as well. [image] masteroman: I’ll have to double check this, but it may restart services that belong to pack…

Ah I see. So what you’re saying is, GNOME software is prompting me to restart to be on the safe side, even though I don’t have to if I don’t want to. Got it. Thank you.

I learn something new each day. I legit thought you can always update without restart. Thank you for the clarification!

Not exactly; GNOME Software only stages the updates until the next boot. If you don’t reboot, you don’t pick up the changes.

Interesting. I am new to Fedora (1) and I was wondering if this was standard practice or because there was a firmware update among the stuff that got upgraded. Well, now I know :slight_smile: (1) I used Fedora at the very beginning back in 2003 with Core 1 to Core 5

GNOME Software Center wants me to restart to install updates

Ask Fedora

benjamind (Benjamin Doron) May 15, 2019, 5:44am 5

From what I’ve seen, there is no decision-making process. Flatpaks are allowed to update themselves online, everything else has to upgrade offline.

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GNOME Software Center wants me to restart to install updates

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