I can’t remember what I wrote about Cockpit… I’m kinda spoiled mostly running mostly Ubuntu based distros like Pop!_OS - soon as I SSH to one of them - it tells me if I need to reboot (and sometimes I “ssh 0” [“0” being shorthand for localhost] to verify in a terminal)… Updating later versions of Debian (only Debian I run is on Raspberry Pi boards) will usually take care of any system services or daemons (restarting them).
When I update systems - and I know there was a kernel update - I know I have to reboot…
e.g. with RPM based distros (like Fedora, CentOS, RHEL or Oracle Linux [or even Alma - but I don’t run any Alma]) it’s usually like 3 months between patching (quarterly patching cycle for my customers’ systems) so I can be pretty sure there will be a kernel update (or I can check, e.g. show my current kernel version with “uname -r” - then check the kernel files in /boot - if they’re higher than my running kernel - then I know I need to reboot… Pretty much the same for Debian…
e.g. “ssh 0” on my thinkpad running Pop!_OS :
╭─x@fenrix ~/bin ‹main*›
╰─➤ ssh 0
Warning: Permanently added '0.0.0.0' (ED25519) to the list of known hosts.
Welcome to Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS (GNU/Linux 6.6.6-76060606-generic x86_64)
* Homepage: https://pop.system76.com
* Support: https://support.system76.com
Last login: Thu Feb 29 08:24:10 2024 from x.x.x.162
And I don’t need to reboot 'cause I haven’t updated for a while (I want to keep running 6.6.6 for a while - just for the “lolz”).