One of the features of linux when I first started using it was that, unlike M$, an upgrade (however small or large) could be done without the necessity of "restarting your computer". IIRC I've done complete distro upgrades in the past without being asked to restart the computer to complete the upgrade. Now (with Mint at least) a restart is required for all but the most trivial of upgrades.

There were bragging rights for who had the longest uptime with some people running into years (I got over a year once).

Does anyone know of a distro that still conforms to that original Linux feature and can be upgraded without requiring a restart?

Thanks

Gentoo of course.

pnguine, what kind of "upgrade" are you talking about?

I reboot for nothing aside from a kernel upgrade, and even that can *technically* be done without a reboot using kpatch.

I'm speaking as a Slackware and CentOS user.

Same here, using Debian Stable. But I'll reboot when doing a dist-upgrade from one major release to the next (every couple years or so). There have been a few dist-upgrades where that really wasn't necessary, perhaps, but there have been three major changes since Sarge where I was more comfortable with doing a reboot. The change from grub to grub2 (would have been upsetting to find out rebooting was broken at some random time later on). The change from old style drive naming to newer style. The switch to systemd.

I move computers and drives and ram sticks around enough that I do plenty more reboots than that, and then there's power outages also.

Linux has has us rebooting for a long time. After a while they figured out a few ways to change without a reboot. You'd have to contact the Mint maintainers for why they are doing this. Either one of two reasons I'd think. One is they didn't want to bother writing a huge script to move stuff back and forth and test orrr there is some problem that they are trying to avoid or can't overcome easily.

I tend to dislike reboots and much prefer cold power cycles. When I update major things I like to do full power down and be sure it powers back up properly.

Reboot can be a good thing. I remember once I set up a FreeBSD server and walked away in a hurry. Weeks later it had to be rebooted ... guess what, it did not come up properly ...