On Fri, 19 Aug 2022 07:36:24 +0200 Kamil Paral kparal@redhat.com wrote:
I can't speak to your particular experience, but updating the system without restarting is unreliable by design (no matter the desktop). If you really want to avoid restarting (I don't recommend it), you can install python3-tracer and then run "sudo tracer -ea". It will try to list all processes which need to be restarted, because their corresponding files changed on disk due to the update. If you see anything listed in the output, you're in a potentially unsafe state. It is just a heuristic, though, it can't detect everything.
I shutdown and restart the system every day, so I want to avoid another. What strikes me about this is that it suddenly started occurring after years of no issues. That is what led me to believe that there was a change that caused this. It also happened again today, without a firmware update, blowing my theory out of the water. Since it is only firefox, at least I think it is only firefox, perhaps it is something in firefox that has changed. Arguing against that is that it was a system version of firefox that hadn't changed that suddenly stopped working. There was an update to systemd about the time this started, and that is pervasive on the system, perhaps it is causing it somehow.
I have been running updates without rebooting and without issue for years, so while I know there is a theoretical possibility of issues, I think it has to be a very rare occurrence. Especially without the desktop running. I'll just switch to updating before I shut down for the day. And / or update less frequently than daily.
Thanks.