The developers of the KDE Neon project, which produces Live builds with the latest versions of KDE software and components, announced the start of testing for an offline system update mechanism in the KDE Neon Unstable Edition builds, provided by the system manager systemd.
The offline mode allows updates to be installed during the early boot stage, avoiding potential conflicts and issues with already running applications. For instance, previous problems during live updates included the need to restart Firefox, crashes of running instances of the Dolphin file manager, and failures in the system lock screen.
When initiating a system update via the Discover interface, updates will no longer be installed immediately — after downloading the necessary packages, a notification will appear indicating that the system needs to be restarted to complete the update. When using other package management interfaces, such as pkcon and apt-get, the updates will still be installed immediately as before. The previous behavior will also be preserved for packages in flatpak and snap formats.
It's worth noting that the KDE neon project was created by Jonathan Riddell, who was removed from his position as the leader of the Kubuntu distribution, to allow for the installation of fresh versions of KDE programs and components. Builds and their associated repositories are updated immediately after KDE releases, without the need to wait for new versions to appear in distribution repositories. The project's infrastructure utilizes a Jenkins continuous integration server, which periodically scans the content. servers regarding the emergence of new releases. When new components are identified, a special Docker-based build container is initiated, in which the package updates are rapidly assembled.
Source: opennet.ru
