> I never needed to reboot.  I just keep working on my stuff, when I'm 
> done I turn the laptop off.  Is there any reason to reboot right after 
> updating?

That's actually a very common misunderstanding. People think that "yum/dnf 
update" leaves their system in a new updated stage. But it doesn't 
(completely). It never has. Only after a reboot are all your patches applied 
and active. Existing/running processes are rarely if ever reloaded. So when you 
update libraries, kernels etc. your system will keep running with the old 
versions of those libraries loaded.  Remember, in Linux a inode is never 
deleted until the very last process has released it. So any read file handles 
will keep a file, even one you cannot see with ls, available.

The only real complete update you can do is one that does a full reboot. We do 
have a few tricks with DNF which will attempt to let you know what needs 
restarting. But you'll find that a good part of our updates requires a restart 
of most if not all your system, in order for the updates to become fully active.

This problem often shows itself on long running servers by a system not coming 
back up/online after a reboot. And nobody understand why - but it's pretty 
simple. Nobody tested that things worked after an update, and in most cases 
that requires a reboot. If you kernel, glibc or network control system gets 
updated, you'll need to reboot to reload them. Or of course take your network 
offline with everything running on your box (good luck!).

So it may look like that "it works just fine" but it's a deception. It's still 
running the older versions of libraries etc for most processes. If you start 
looking at what's actually running after your update, you'll find that a good 
part of your updated packages aren't running (yet) - and old versions are still 
active.  If you're attempting to apply security updates, this is an important 
distinction and vital to be compliant. For us ordinary users, it's mostly an 
annoyance as features we wanted, aren't there right after an update, or 
programs starts failing after an update, as they attempt to dynamicly load in 
modules and find them "changed", at times not even compatible with the running 
older version, and things end up "strange". I've seen fonts go nuts, 
backgrounds disappear, general themes not working etc. after an update on a 
workstation, simply because the structure got changed - CSSes looking for files 
that no longer are there, etc. 

//
 Peter
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