Kernel updates are not forced like is the case on windows. And yes, linux allows you to update the kernel without rebooting: it's called kernel live patching.
Linux has no mandatory automatic updates in the first place,* so this situation doesn't ever need to take place.
To answer your question, it is possible to update the Linux kernel without rebooting, but you may run into some issues with kernel modules that would be solved with a reboot.
* Edit: After writing this comment, I remembered that Snaps on Linux have automatic updates that can only be deferred up to 90 days. However, Snaps don't handle Linux kernel updates. I don't recommend using Snaps.
> Edit: After writing this comment, I remembered that Snaps on Linux have automatic updates that can only be deferred up to 90 days. However, Snaps don't handle Linux kernel updates. I don't recommend using Snaps.
I didn't even know that. It's one more item on the list of reasons to not use Snaps.
The situation improved after the May 2019 update, but the updates will still be automatically installed after you pause them every 7 days for a maximum of 5 times (35 days total):
Automatically installed, yet no automatic reboots. Maybe it’s because I’ve never used the Home edition, but I’ve never had Windows force a reboot on me. Sometimes my laptop won’t wake up out of sleep mode and it reboots, but that’s about every 2 months.
The last time I was really angry about Windows was with Window Me. The entire TCP stack took a dive which I couldn’t recover from. Even replaced the NIC. Replaced that with Windows 2000 and haven’t had a serious issue since.
Windows 10 pro also did that. Not sure if it still does, because after it happened to me once I waded into the policy editor and disabled all that shite. However, there was at least one forced update that happened to me after that. No idea why.
But windows is also weird. People always talk about ads or having candy crush forcefully reinstalled after updates. I strongly suspect these things vary by region, because those two at least I never noticed.
Staged Windows updates are a pretty common source of behaviors that do require reboots.
Everything from HID devices not responding, task manager and utilities like Settings not opening, device drivers left in an unstable state, and more can happen. To their credit, it does usually fail in a way that allows users to close applications before they're compelled to restart.
I’ve had Windows spontaneously restart on me while I’m doing stuff, to apply an update. If it was somehow my fault, I have no idea what caused it, and so it’s Microsoft’s fault after all since it wasn’t clear.
My computer once decided that 1 A.M. in the night is a great time to automagically boot up and do updates. I had to physically turn off power, so it wasn't able to do that. Even disabling that feature in the bios didn't work for some reason. I still don't know how the machine was able to do it. Fast boot wasn't even enabled, because it caused other problems when it was.
It stopped happening someday, but it's still haunting me. It doesn't really build trust.
On Linux, one can instruct the BIOS to turn on the computer at a specified time after suspend or even power off using rtcwake [1]. I don't know many things about Windows but I guess they are doing something like this.
Yeah, that's what i tried to turn off in the BIOS. It's actually one of the earlier UEFI enabled ones from MSI. I guess it's a bit bugged. It also tends to freeze when i have it open for too long. There are no updates anymore and i don't get a decent CPU for it, so i'll probably upgrade it soon-ish. Just not sure if i'll get MSI again or maybe try something else this time. Asus seems neat.
Since Windows 10. It is possible to disable it, but Microsoft fought very hard to prevent people from doing so by putting up a ton of road blocks. It was a loudly decried 'feature'.
I do not use it on the desktop so I have no idea if that works, I would guess that binary graphics drivers are unpatchable with live patch. I've patched the kernel on servers like that for a long time now, I recommended it warmly no problems so far!
It works the same on desktop as servers. I don't run anything that requires binary graphics drivers though (got far, far away from trying to use Nvidia on Linux many years ago), so I can't speak to that.
There is a program called needrestart which you can run after updates to see what needs restarting to load new copies of libraries etc. Generally speaking you only need to actually reboot for kernel updates.
When you update, you update everything - OS and apps all in one go unless you manually install stuff yourself outside of the package manager. Updates take from seconds to a few minutes unless you are running Gentoo in which case its from minutes to days or even weeks whilst your compiler crunches its way through vast seas of source code and you fix the various issues along the way 8)
You can automate the whole thing or not - up to you.
Grandparent was a facetious question intended to deflate the great-grandparent, which suggested that Windows' annoying need to restart for every damn thing was comparable somehow to Linux's update requirements.
Which as parent points out are functionally nonexistent, except for a rare kernel update (and you don't have to restart if your glasses are thick enough to live patch).
I often suggest Manjaro, which is smart enough to do all the updating for you, but is also Arch enough to let you do it all manually.
