I noticed the other day that one of the applications on my iMac required updating. This seemed to do an update for the whole system and a few updates were found. This all seemed perfectly natural to me the only thing that did come as a little surprise was the fact that the updates required a restart of the computer…
I always thought that this was a Windows issue. Using Windows it seems that most installations required at least one restart to complete the process.
Linux, on the other hand, allows files to be replaced even if they are in use, allowing use of the new version next time the files are required. There are certain circumstances where the files are kept in memory, the kernel for example, and then only a manual restart would force the new files to be used.
As OS X is based around Linux, as far as I understand, then I wasn’t expecting to be asked to restart…
I am not saying this is a bad thing, maybe there was an update that did require a restart to be completely installed so why no ask to do it at the end of the update process?
It is still early days for me with OS X and so I’m not sure if this is a regular thing and it certainly isn’t any worse than on Windows. I just like the idea of my iMac staying on for long periods of time, especially as it is so good at going into a low powered state, without the obligatory reboots required on a Windows system if you want it to continue to run smoothly…