Linux for Everyone — Lesson 10: Updates

(Automated transcription, lightly cleaned up by AI)

Lesson 10 – Updates in Linux

So unlike Windows Update, Linux updates are partially automatic. By that I mean they are downloaded automatically and you’ll be notified—sometimes subtly—that updates are available. But they’re never going to be forced on you. You’re never going to encounter a reboot that you didn’t expect.

Let’s have a quick look at my Linux machine, which currently has some updates available. In the lower right-hand corner, you’ll see that there’s a shield icon, which is the software manager. And it says that there are five updates available.

I’ll click on it, and now it’s telling me exactly what those five updates are. There are some internal tools—honestly, a lot of the stuff you’ll see here you probably won’t necessarily care about. Not unlike Windows, if you ever take a look at some of the list of the updates there.

But you’ll notice that there are a couple of common or familiar names here. Firefox has an update ready for it, and Thunderbird, the email program, has an update ready for it. Linux itself has a couple of interesting updates. And “bind”—again, like I said, that’s an internal tool that honestly you should never really have to worry about. It’s part of what implements DNS, translating things like askleo.com into the IP address of the actual server.

We’ve got these five updates ready to go. They are shown as a security update, a kernel update (which means the actual operating system itself), and then a generic software update.

We’ll click on *Install Updates*. And now, of course, we need to authenticate that we are in fact authorized to take updates on this system, and the updates happen.

If you’re ever curious, hitting *Details* can be kind of interesting in that it’s showing you what’s being downloaded and then later what’s actually being run. You can see here it’s unpacking Firefox or doing some other things. It’s running a number of command-line utilities in the background that actually perform the update.

And there it is. Our system is up to date. That was a system update.

Sometimes—not always, but sometimes—you will be told that in order for an update to complete, you’ll need to reboot your machine. Linux is no different in this regard than Windows.

What is different is that you’ll be *asked* to reboot your machine. You won’t be told. It won’t be scheduled for you. It won’t happen in the middle of the night without you looking. You actually have to take the reboot, which is great.

That’s exactly how I want these things to happen. I never want my machine to be rebooted without my explicit permission. I want the choice of when that should happen.

The good news is, of course, you could defer it for a very long time. Linux will keep on running even though you haven’t necessarily rebooted yet. However, if you can, I kind of recommend that you do—if you’re told that a reboot is necessary to complete an update, go ahead and do it.

But that’s updates in Linux. It’s not particularly complicated. And honestly, it harkens back to the simpler days of Windows, when Windows wasn’t trying to be either as aggressive—or helpful—depending on who you asked.

Next up, we’re going to talk about something that I suspect you’re wondering why I haven’t talked about before. And that is… backing up. We’ll see you there.