So a while back I threw Ubuntu 22 LTS on an old Surface Pro 3 and gave it to my Dad.
He loves it, but he’s the type who’s been burnt by updating software in the past, so he basically refuses any whenever prompted.
Been thinking about throwing Debian with Gnome on it for a while, and wondering if it’s stable enough to just let updates happen automatically in the background?
I got no experience with Debian I basically jumped right on EndeavourOS as my main distro when I started using Linux full time.
I’ve been running Debian stable with unattended-upgrades on servers for years and have had no issues whatsoever.
How does it handle it when services or the OS need a restart after an upgrade?
It’ll try to restart the affected services after updating, but doesn’t always auto restart everything; sometimes it’ll leave services running if you’d otherwise need to deal with dependencies and such. In that case, it’ll touch a reboot-required file that’ll inform you a reboot is necessary next time you log in.
Scheduling a weekly/daily reboot should take care of that, as well as applying kernel updates.
Services are automatically restarted. There is no automatic reboot by default, but that can be enabled if you really want to. Otherwise it’ll keep track of whether a reboot is necessary or not.