Wow even just the “needrestart” program is really useful from that article. I had no idea I had services previously updated which were still hanging out there.
On a desktop/laptop system you soon notice when things like your touchpad loses multi touch support and USB sticks no longer work because your kernel mods no longer match the “old” kernel!
needrestart and co are really handy. When lsof first came out, I remember finding a recipe similar to the one posted and “mind blown”!
I guess I always considered the desktop machines as expendable – to be rebooted as needed. However my servers (particularly the firewall and NAS) are somewhat critical, especially with newer servers taking so damn long to reboot, so I don’t shut those down unless absolutely needed.