You do have to reboot to use your new kernel after an update. But it's just a normal reboot, not the whole blocking installation process like in Windows.

[–] Quadrexium@sopuli.xyz 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

And a Linux reboot takes like 40s at most and everything works. Where in Windows it takes like 2m to be able to log in and a good 5-10m for all the apps to start working at normal speed

[–] SexualPolytope@lemmy.sdf.org 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not always, but mostly yeah. Especially for home users, it's not worth the hassle.

[–] Amends1782@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Same thing canonical pushes with Ubuntu pro right?

[–] SexualPolytope@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

kpatch is what RHEL uses. The Ubuntu one is called livepatch. IIRC, it's not open source.

[–] drcobaltjedi@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Aren't there distros that treat the kernal like anyother package and can hot swap it?

[–] black0ut@pawb.social 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

you can't really hot swap the kernel, because all of the system runs on it.

you'd need to stop the system (you can save its state and recover where you left), reboot to load the new kernel and let it take control.

however, there are some distros and programs that allow you to hot swap certain parts of the kernel (mainly drivers) without rebooting. Note that, even though the system doesn't reboot, most packages still need to be restarted for them to pick up the new driver.

[–] usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago

Not quite like that but there is a thing called live patching that some distros offer. It's mainly to used fix security issues rather than a typical update

Ubuntu livepatching and kpatch are some different tools out there for that if you want to look into it

[–] seitanic@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ever since I switched to Arch, I've never had to restart to update. I always restart anyway, because I want the update to apply to my current session, but I don't have to.

[–] Bene7rddso@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

lol Arch was the distro where I had to reboot the most after updates because the new kernel modules wouldn't load with the old kernel

[–] seitanic@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 1 year ago

To be fair, I've never used pure Arch. The Arch derivatives I've used are Manjaro and Garuda.