Chapter 18. Updating the operating system
Keeping your Linux system up-to-date is important for security reasons but also for functionality reasons. When you update your system, you’re updating the operating system, but also the software, which means you’re getting new features and improvements as they come into your repository.
You’re also fixing any security vulnerabilities that have been discovered and corrected. Programmers are human. They make mistakes in their code and sometimes these mistakes can compromise the security of our computers. Updates often occur because someone found a mistake and then fixed it. Keeping your system up-to-date is important to keep your system running well.
Updating and upgrading your system
It’s considered best-practice to update and upgrade your system regularly, starting from when you first install a new distribution. I update mine around once a week.
We didn’t do that in our case because I wanted to build up to that activity.
But when you next install another distribution, make sure you upgrade it right away!
In the previous chapter, we used the package manager to add new repositories, and now we’re going to use it to update our system. In this chapter, we’re going to talk about two concepts:
- Updating the system, where we make sure all of the latest packages are in our repository.
- Upgrading the system, where we install all of those new packages.