This is a very old debate and many people just do not know how much of a distraction it is to constantly “worry” about the need to reboot. I am happy for them that their computing life is so simple.
Rebooting is a context switch for me that can take more than an hour (at times) to recover from - i.e., get back to my working state before the reboot.
I frequently need to debug distributed systems written in multiple languages, and have multiple debuggers working together to help troubleshoot. It is very complicated to get to the correct state to examine what is happening. And these sessions can span multiple days at times.
So I did write an indicator.
WARNING! I wrote this for myself given the other tools and system configuration I have in place. It is not easy to start using.
But with this set of things running (systemd .service and associated .timer plus a GNOME extension) - I can easily tell what needs my attention and whether that needs to happen today or not.
Current screenshot - just captured:
Bluefin has updates because I am running on the previous version waiting for the nvidia pieces to get in sync upstream …