I really wish GNOME’s “Oh No! Something went wrong!” screen would let me restart just the crashed components instead of forcing me to log out completely. Or let me decide if I’m willing to continue without whatever crashed. If the audio broke, and I’m not doing anything that needs sound right now, it shouldn’t block me! — just like if the extension I’m
Heck, I’d even settle for just being able to interact with the applications that are still running. I can see them on the overview, and the thumbnails still update! Fortunately I haven’t had it happen while I was editing something, but I’d sure like to be able to click on “save” if I need to!
When I first started using Linux, it was a lot less stable than it is today, but when something broke, I always felt like I could fix it. Even if a window manager crashed, I could relaunch it and pick up where I left off.
I keep coming back to GNOME, but it has an infurating tendency to weld the hood shut on things that “just work” most of the time, because you should never need to fix that issue! (See also: Geary not offering manual sync, GNOME Software wanting to reboot the system when you update Firefox, etc.)
@kelson what distro are you running GNOME on top of?
These days most do their updating on reboot, so that sometimes yes, it needs to reboot to finish updates. That part is going to be dependent on the Linux distro you're using, less so about GNOME, though your other complaints are definitely on point
Most *can* do their updating on reboot, but they don’t *have* to. Especially not for a web browser that’s not running all the time. I’m talking about running the updater while the system is running, not just checking the box when I shut it down to say “yes, install updates first.”
Besides, for the most part, unless the kernel or systemd is updated, you only *need* to restart an individual application or service to apply an update. Restarting helps to make sure *everything* gets put into a known stable state, and I usually do anyway if a service or desktop environment is changed (and besides, Fedora updates the kernel at the drop of a hat), but it’s a waste of time when you can just close an app window and relaunch it.
To be fair, the system I noticed it on was a Fedora Silverblue VM where I’ve been testing various browsers, and while the ones it was happy to update without rebooting were all Flatpaks, I don’t recall offhand whether Silverblue installs Firefox as part of the immutable system or on top of it.
Amusingly, I just checked on my main desktop, which is running Fedora Workstation, and where I normally run `dnf update` and `flatpak update` from the command line out of habit…and Gnome thinks updating the *Vivaldi* RPM needs me to restart the OS!
@kelson haha, yeah I had lots of pain points with Silverblue and Bazzite and other immutable distros, for what its worth on the usual Fedora won't make you restart the computer for a browser update, but Librewolf at least will demand to be restarted, and will misbehave until I do!
When I update using GNOME, nothing forces me to reboot though, there's no notification or anything, so I dunno what you mean! Is there a notification or something?
On both regular Fedora and Silverblue, the Gnome update GUI has a section for system updates that only has a restart-and-update button, and a section for other software that has update and update-all buttons. Firefox is in the first section, at least on Silverblue. Apparently it *is* part of the base image on SB, which would certainly explain it! https://gitlab.com/fedora/ostree/sig/-/issues/3
I’ll have to check the GUI on my main desktop (which runs regular Fedora) the next time there’s an update to Firefox and see which section it shows up in on there.
@kelson I'll check next update, but when I did my usual command line sudo dnf -y update –refresh I get nothin', but I'll pay more attention to the gui stuff, I rarely update with the software center, just cause I forget and it's faster for me to type, ha
Yeah, the CLI doesn’t have the same limitations, which is part of why I use it most of the time, but I haven’t gotten around to looking up how to update Silverblue from the commandline, so I’ve been using the GUI on there.
@kelson it's an rpm-ostree thing I think, but Bazzite had a nice 'ujust update' command aliased
@kelson Looks like I could still keep updating things that aren't system stuff, but then I click the wee update button on the secure boot, it updates and then isn't on the list anymore, so idk! It doesn't prevent me from doing anything else seemingly.
@kelson also I'm forever annoyed that large fonts don't get respect in UI resizing, but hopefully eventually :V Hate the '…' instead of just reflowing it (as if I know how to code, lol)
@kelson I did get a notification asking me if I wanted to reboot, but that's it.