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This is not true. Different programs on the same system that interoperate and use different versions of the same shared library can absolutely cause issues.

For a trivial change to glibc, it won't cause issues. But there's a lot of shared libraries and lots of different kinds of changes in different kinds of libraries that can happen.

I still haven't nailed if it was due to a shared library update, but just the other day, after running upgrades I was unable to su or sudo / authenticate as a user until after rebooting.



It does happen, but it's pretty rare compared to Windows in my experience, where inconvenience is essentially guaranteed.

Firefox on Linux did not really enjoy being updated while running, as far as I remember; Chrome was fine with it, but only since it does some extra work to bypass the problem via its "zygote process": https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/docs/l...


Works fine with Nix and Guix since it doesn't replace JS or other shared config files in-place to perform updates




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