>also won't restart anything by themselves

Is it very not true? Apt restarts processes and services all the time during upgrades.

Apt always prompts me as to which services I want to restart following an upgrade.

I think they might be in ubuntu server installations. I think they aren't enabled by default on debian… at least not on my installs.

I have a bunch of ubuntu containers at work, none of them self update by default, I know that because I had to enable unattended upgrades manually in all of them. Maybe it's a lxc template thing?

If you got them from dockerhub or similar… that's not a default ubuntu install.

When Firefox is updated by apt on 20.04, it keeps working until I open a new tab. Then it shows a page asking me to restart the browser and won't do anything else until I comply. This is a choice of Mozilla.

When Ubuntu prompts me to restart the system after an update I can dismiss the dialog even for weeks, but at a certain point the cumulative updates start making the system behave erratically and I have to restart. Probably kernel, drivers, libc, other vital stuff get too much disaligned.

> When Firefox is updated by apt on 20.04, it keeps working until I open a new tab. Then it shows a page asking me to restart the browser and won't do anything else until I comply. This is a choice of Mozilla.

Parts of the program were updated and now the program is in a not tested, half-updated, half-old state.

The "other choice" for Mozilla is pretending nothing happened, attempt to open the tab, probably immediatly segfaulting and losing all your current work in a potentially unrecoverable way. Not really a good choice under most circunstances.

It started doing that only a few months ago. Apparently it worked in the half updated state before then but of course the implementation and the update process could have changed.

> I don't think unattended upgrades are enabled on debian or on ubuntu.

I don't think it's true, I had the disable unintended upgrade on Ubuntu because it runs cpu at 100% and make very big noise at night.