this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2024
174 points (99.4% liked)
Linux
48726 readers
880 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
requirement of the root password? why would it need that, when it normally doesn't? to clarify, I didn't mean the "sudo reboot" command, but the reboot button in the KDE application launcher
systemd always requires root password for poweroff and reboot commands and polkit does that for you normally when using GUI. However that problem occurs when polkit timeout runs out. I don't know the exact mechanism behind it so I cannot tell exactly when it happens. When it doesn't do that, those commands don't run via a GUI. So this is on part systemd and part the distro.