How did Linux "know" it wasn't updated when not online?
Hey all, just a quick question based on something that happened to me the other day that was kind of perplexing me. I had Mint on an old laptop that I last booted around 2.5 years ago. When I first booted it up, Mint took quite a long while to start (a full 20 minutes). Once I got online and got everything updated, it all runs super-fast again. But my question is like... since the laptop wasn't online during that first boot, and it wasn't as if any new programs had been installed or anything in the intervening years the laptop wasn't booted up, how did it "know" it wasn't updated? Why was it slow?
I'm thinking analogously of what might happen if I went and turned on a vintage IBM 386 or something with DOS on it. Even if it hadn't been powered on in ten years, it would, assuming the hardware was good, just boot right up into DOS with seemingly no distinction between whether it had last been booted the day before or a decade before. What's the explanation here?