The developers of the KDE Neon project, which creates live builds with the latest versions of KDE programs and components, announced the start of testing the offline system update mechanism provided by the systemd system manager in KDE Neon Unstable Edition builds.
Offline mode means installing updates not during operation, but at the initial stage of system boot, at which the updated components cannot lead to conflicts and problems in the operation of already running applications. Examples of issues that have been encountered when installing updates on the fly include the need to restart Firefox, crashes of running instances of the Dolphin file manager, and crashes in the system lock screen.
When initiating a system update through the Discover interface, updates will no longer be installed immediately - after the required packages are downloaded, a notification will be displayed that the system needs to be rebooted to complete the update. When using other package management interfaces such as pkcon and apt-get, updates will be installed immediately as before. The previous behavior will also continue for flatpak and snap packages.
Recall that the KDE neon project was created by Jonathan Riddell, who was removed from the post of leader of the Kubuntu distribution, in order to provide the ability to install fresh versions of KDE programs and components. Builds and their associated repositories are updated as soon as KDE releases are released, without having to wait for new versions to appear in the distribution's repositories. The project infrastructure uses the Jenkins continuous integration server, which periodically scans the contents of the servers for new releases. When new components are identified, a special assembly container based on Docker starts, in which package updates are promptly generated.
Source: opennet.ru