Hi! I’ve been using Linux for a few years now, but I’m relatively new to the Atomic/Immutable paradigm. I’m currently experimenting with Bluefin on my laptop and Bazzite on my desktop, but I still haven’t found an answer to a question I have regarding automatic updates:
What happens if i shut down during one? Since the system doesn’t notify me when an update is in progress, I’m unsure if this could lead to any issues.
Maybe it’s a silly question, and I should just trust the process as the docs suggest. Still, I can’t help but feel uneasy about shutting down during an update (whether it’s for the system, Flatpaks, firmware, or Distrobox).
For now, I’ve written a very basic gnome extension that listens to DBus signals and shows with an indicator in the panel if an update is running.
It also helped me notice that ublue-update.service was failing in bazzite but that’s another issue I need to figure out.
If you would shutdown during the update process it would (atleast I think) just boot the older/current image.
The actual image is only put in place once the deployment part at the end is done (you can see this when running the update command from the terminal → first it will download the missing layers/chunks → once that is done it starts the “deployment”)
Not really as those are more like normal app updates. Those won’t effect your booting capability but might cause issues with apps/distroboxes if their updates are interrupted.
Usually fixable by just running the updates for those again.
Firmware updates (atleast bios updates) are done during boot
Thank you for the confirmation on system updates. They were the least worrying given that it’s the whole purpose of atomic updates, but for flatpaks and distrobox I think it’s still better to avoid the risk of having to repair any half done updates, so I think i’ll continue keeping an eye on the ublue-update.service before shutting down.
Distrobox containers breaking probably will happen eventually regardless. They are intended to be remade as the nature of them. You may want to look into distrobox-assemble since you can make your own declarative boxes that include all the packages you want. I’m not actually sure what happens if you stop the update mid-way since they are based on non-atomic Linux distros, so they could break if the upgrade is halted midway through from I’d assume but someone can correct me if they know for certain.
I wanted to point this out though that Flatpak updates can be stopped midway and shouldn’t break, but if you do have issues with Flatpaks, use Warehouse (preinstalled) to downgrade applications, delete userdata, etc.
If you set up your distroboxes to destroy, repull, and then recreate them it’ll be fine because those are just podman pulls. That’s the right way to set them up.