Developers of the KDE Neon project , within which Live assemblies with the current versions of KDE programs and components are generated, reported to start testing in assemblies KDE Neon Unstable Edition an offline system update mechanism, provided by the systemd system manager.
Offline mode means installing updates not during operation, but at the initial stage of the system boot, at which the updated components cannot lead to conflicts and problems in the operation of already running applications. Some examples of issues that occurred 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 downloading the necessary packages, a notification will be displayed about the need to reboot the system 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 be retained for packages in flatpak and snap formats.
As a reminder, the KDE neon project was created by Jonathan Riddell, who was removed from his post as the leader of the Kubuntu distribution, in order to provide the ability to install the latest versions of KDE software 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 repositories. The project infrastructure uses the Jenkins continuous integration server, which periodically scans the content of the servers for new releases. When new components are identified, a special build container based on Docker starts, in which package updates are quickly generated.