I’ve been searching for a way to set a time for automatic updates under system settings. 3 am would be good for me. I think this would be a great feature to have added to system settings. Choose daily, weekly or monthly like we have now and have another entry to set the time of the day that it happens.
hi, welcome.
this is likely a distro specific answer
what is the output of kinfo?
Huh? I don’t understand why this would be distro specific. It’s an option inside kde plasma system settings. any kde distro i’ve run has the same option.
i have access to frequency in discover, but not all plasma distros use discover.
and as you say, the choice is daily, weekly, monthly, or never … no time of day in the GUI.
i’m sure you can find the cron job somewhere and edit that manually with a text editor if you know what you are doing.
try looking in
2026-07-24+09:42:52.1091460650 ./.config/PlasmaDiscoverUpdates
Exactly what I’m asking for. You are correct that not every kde distro uses discover, but for the many that do being able to set the time in the gui would be a good thing, especially for new users that don’t know what cron is.
you can set the interval in seconds with
RequiredNotificationInterval=
so if you pick the time of day you want to have it check for updates and put in an even days worth of seconds, then it should check at that same time every day.
just guessing tho.
oh, i think you can edit the LastNotificationTime= and change the countdown start for the interval that way.
Thank you, but I’m not asking how to hack my kde installation. I’m asking for a useful and functional feature that could be a good thing for a lot of people that I think and hope would/should be pretty easy to add.
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it probably would be fairly easy since the configuration file has the parameters needed, which is why i pointed it out (at least for discover).
didn’t mean for “you” to be taken literally, apologies for being unclear.
and i did, man, i apologize profoundly.
Thank you for clearing and appreciate your help
It seems there are two layers involved here as far as I can see in my Debian 14 system: firstly, the underlying apt update service, and secondly, packagekit update service used by Plasma Discover.
I don’t even know if they work synchronously, but it seems they don’t as sometimes I see updates when I launch Synaptic Package Manager of which Plasma Discover seems not yet aware.
So, it seems there’s some work need to be done here, and it doesn’t seem too complex to let users manage timing software updates in System Settings.
Personally I’ve made some progress in trying to create a more user-friendly method (e.g. opting for offline updates only when system software packages are involved, and opting for online updates in the background otherwise, having a quick view of the full list of pending updates without launching Discover, Synaptic Package Manager etc.), but it seems I just need to spend a little more effort to customize those systemd service and timer config files so that they check updates only when I want exactly.