this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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not trying to be the one person who pushes linux down everyones throats, but in all of my time using it i had to restart to update only once
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.
Aren't there distros that treat the kernal like anyother package and can hot swap it?
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.
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