I thought more recent OS had ways to update files currently in use and not require reboots.
Corporate policy of rebooting once a week and forcing it is killing me: I usually have tens of excel windows interlinked, and having to reboot daily just saps my will to live….
In: 68
Because it is easier to have it work that way.
Updating involves replacing files that the operating system is currently using. Now it is possible to write an OS so that it can swap those files out with a reboot and there are now some versions, of some OSes that can do it.
But it is a *lot* easier to write an OS if you don’t attempt to support that.
All the popular OSes in use at the moment started out having to reboot for significant updates. It is just that some of them have since done the hard-work to be able to update the while OS without rebooting.
Linux was closer to be able to do this right from the start than for example Windows was. But that was more an accident of history than deliberate design. The Linux kernel was bundled together with a lot of other services and tools from other people, with very little integration between those different services and the kernel (early on there weren’t even shared libraries to worry about).
This meant even at the start it was easy to stop, update and restart one of those services without rebooting.
Windows also had services that could be stopped and started. But those services all came from Microsoft and they were a lot more interrelated with each other and the Windows kernel than on Linux. That made it a lot harder to support stopping parts of the OS, updating them and starting them up again.
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