Not completely but kind of, all those poweroff, reboot etc. tied to systemd, though I believe this is mostly related to polkit run out of time.

that’s right, but as I remember the error was talking about being unable to launch that KDE-specufic countdown overlay. journalctl has shown such an error for every time I tried to stop the session in any of the ways.

Normally updates don’t change a thing on Linux since the system runs on RAM.

that’s not how I understand the system is working. could you elaborate?

I’ve learned this lesson with my Android phone a few years ago. There it was actually about sqlite databases of a system app (contacts I think?), but this can happen with other formats too. Worst is if it doesn’t just error out, but tries to work with “garbage”, because it’ll possibly take much more time to debug it, or even realize that your data is corrupt.

will that also restore your data? what happens when a program updates its database structure with the update, and the old version you restore won’t understand it anymore?

being able to revert a failed upgrade by restoring a snapshot is not a power user need but a very basic feature for everyday users who do not want to debug every little problem that can go wrong, but just want to use their computer.

ext4 does not allow that.

Not sure what that is or what menu it is. But yeah, the updates are not automatic, you have to manually start it. That “must restart after the update” thing is related to systemd, not openSUSE.

I don’t think it’s systemd’s fault that I repeatedly experienced general system unstability after installing updates with zypper.
By this I mean several elements of the system becoming unresponsive, like the shutdown, reboot, log out buttons stopping from working (them being pressed only resulting in a syslog error about being unable to start the program that shows the countdown), but also other programs like firefox acting weiry.
I don’t think it’s the fault of opensuse specifically.

And if you think about it, it’s logical that this would happen.
Because version A of programs is what is still running, but the filesystem now has version B of a lot of things including executables and libraries, with lots of changes, and the assumptions for which version A programs were coded do not hold up anymore. And they crash, not even start, or do bad things. Processes that make use of D-Bus are especially sensisensitive to this, but others like firefox sometimes get tangled into it when they load a library only after the files were updated (yes I’ve experienced that too, both on linux and windows).

It’s no wonder windows installers always ask you to close all (related) programs before installing or updating. It’s not unique to windows: android kills the app when it is updated, abd system updates require a restart as well. I don’t know what does flatpak do, but I’m sure that after updating the package, only after restarting its app will the changes get applied.

leap 15.4, with KDE.

When there is an update a notification pops up, you go to system tray, click on the icon and do the updates.

you mean the menu that will make your system unstable if you dont reboot immediately after updates?
if I can remember, it also does not do it automatically, by which I mean there is no setting to make it automatic.

to try to make it better I had to install a separate package, of which I have not found any information on suse documentation, to have the KDE built-in automatic update system.

and it does not work.
it restarts the system twice, after which zypper still says that all the updates need to be installed.

I don’t understand, sorry. what I meant is the way you as the user do upgrades. you grab a terminal, elevate and run the system update command (zypper refresh, zypper update). major version upgrades are more complicated.

I can do this sure. But this is not noob friendly the slightest. and the YaST graphical tools don’t make it much better either.
I won’t say that the update system of windows is good because why the fuck does searching for updates minutes, and other reasons. but the UI of it is much better. it tells you what will it update, it has a button for starting the process, an automatism for it too. there’s also a menu for the update history.

how do they do regular updates? how do they do major version upgrades?

I think both of these is a big pain point.