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Upgrade to Freedom! The Switch from Windows 10
(news.opensuse.org)
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this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2024
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Not sure what that is or what menu it is. But yeah, the updates are not automatic, you have to manually start it. That "must restart after the update" thing is related to systemd, not openSUSE.
If someone wants an auto update system, that can be arranged with scripts. No idea where that could be done via GUI though. Sorry, I cannot check it right away since it's not my system. I don't use openSUSE or KDE myself.
I don't think it's systemd's fault that I repeatedly experienced general system unstability after installing updates with zypper.
By this I mean several elements of the system becoming unresponsive, like the shutdown, reboot, log out buttons stopping from working (them being pressed only resulting in a syslog error about being unable to start the program that shows the countdown), but also other programs like firefox acting weiry.
I don't think it's the fault of opensuse specifically.
And if you think about it, it's logical that this would happen.
Because version A of programs is what is still running, but the filesystem now has version B of a lot of things including executables and libraries, with lots of changes, and the assumptions for which version A programs were coded do not hold up anymore. And they crash, not even start, or do bad things. Processes that make use of D-Bus are especially sensisensitive to this, but others like firefox sometimes get tangled into it when they load a library only after the files were updated (yes I've experienced that too, both on linux and windows).
It's no wonder windows installers always ask you to close all (related) programs before installing or updating. It's not unique to windows: android kills the app when it is updated, abd system updates require a restart as well. I don't know what does flatpak do, but I'm sure that after updating the package, only after restarting its app will the changes get applied.
Not completely but kind of, all those poweroff, reboot etc. tied to systemd, though I believe this is mostly related to polkit run out of time. Can be fixed with a longer timeout. This also happens to me on Arch and yeah it's kinda annoying.
Normally updates don't change a thing on Linux since the system runs on RAM. However, with these systemd updates, things have changed. Without systemd, it's still the same more or less.
that's right, but as I remember the error was talking about being unable to launch that KDE-specufic countdown overlay. journalctl has shown such an error for every time I tried to stop the session in any of the ways.
that's not how I understand the system is working. could you elaborate?
Oh, I meant a running system. Usually you would only need to reboot if you want to use the new kernel right away after an update. For most of the programs, you don't even need to restart them if they're already running. However, if you restart them they will run as the newer updated version.
and the new version of all the software that is still running with the old version.
~~how? won't they keep being the old version?~~
oh, yeah, we agree on that. but my point is that in my experience, a lot of software gets very confused if some libs it would use or resource files have changed after they were started. often that's also the reason why holding back a package's version makes trouble over time (because certain other packages can't be updated either), or same with using custom repos that have a different release schedule or maybe are not even in sync with your distro
That's why it's recommended to reboot after a major update, and usually there is a notification for that. But there is usually no need to rush the reboot if you work on something.
If one needs a certain release of a program I guess using the AppImage version would be the best.
but that's where it becomes more serious: when basic functions of the system fail, silently. when you can't even reboot without a terminal, because the reboot dialog crashes
It actually doesn't crash, it just cannot show the requirement of the root password in a dialog. I think this can be fixed via lengthen the timeout of polkit. Though I can understand why most distros don't change the default time because of security reasons. It would be nice if they give an option for it, at least for personal use cases. However, completely removing that timeout would be a security problem, even if the only user is you.