Unless you’re updating the kernel itself, there is little chance you actually need to reboot your machine. Just restarting whatever service or application you’re using should do the trick.
This is the same on Windows, you can just carry on and then complete an update when you go to shut down the machine. Can’t remember the last time an app install or update required the whole OS to be restarted immediately.
I remember what it’s called, but at some point there was an app for windows that would check if your machine actually needed a restart or not. Basically the “restart your machine” prompt is mostly just a boilerplate. It’s very rare that those installers touch anything that can’t actually be loaded without a restart.
I tried installing rust which required some Visual Studio compiler on a Windows machine configured to reset itself when rebooted. It decided I needed a reboot. I’m glad I didn’t have unsaved files…
Needless to say I could not run my program on that machine. Why does it need a reboot? I don’t know. It’s just meant to be a compiler.
And on some distros you can also just reload the kernel without rebooting
Not necessarily, you can use kexec
