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Comment by emkoemko

4 years ago

people on linux wait for updates? i thought that was a thing only for mac and windows... never noticed or seen a update screen on linux unlike the Windows nightmare where it would even kick you out of your work to do a damn update

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emkoemko

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microtonal  4 years ago

people on linux wait for updates?

Yes, Fedora downloads packages first and then reboots the machine to perform the actual updates and then reboots again into the updated system [1]. You can still run dnf update manually, but the recommended path is the former one. Why? Because in contrast to what many commenters say here, in-place updates of Linux systems can go wrong. Apparently, Fedora have encountered this often enough that they they have started doing 'offline updates'.

(The proper solution, which Silverblue/Fedora IoT/Fedora coreOS/NixOS/GUIX do is to make system updates atomic with roll-back.)

[1] https://fedoramagazine.org/offline-updates-and-fedora-35/

  • emkoemko  4 years ago

    just checked how Fedora does it... it just downloads the updates and when you shutdown it installs them for you before it finally shuts down, doesn't seem as bad and not how you said it was.

    • microtonal  4 years ago

      You are wrong. See the specification on the Fedora Wiki:

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

      The system update mode is implemented by booting into a special target. The target installs the downloaded updates and then reboots back into the regular default target.

      You can also see the process in the video on the end of this page:

      https://www.addictivetips.com/ubuntu-linux-tips/upgrade-fedo...

      You can see that after choosing to install the updates, the system reboots. Then it uses systemd functionality to switch into a special update target. Then it reboots again to boot into the updated system.

      Finally, also see the article that I linked in the earlier post:

      https://fedoramagazine.org/offline-updates-and-fedora-35/

      The process of restarting, applying updates, and then restarting again is called Offline Updates. Your computer boots into a special save-mode, where all other systems are disabled and where network access is unavailable. It then applies the updates and restarts.

      I am currently using Fedora headless. But the last time I used Fedora on the desktop (~a year ago), I am pretty sure it still did the reboot-update-reboot dance. The exception to this is Fedora Silverblue, which downloads a new system image and then boots into that in a single boot.