Avoiding X11 updates when not connected to the internet.

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1

I don’t like to keep my computer connected to the internet 24 hours a day. I want to force myself to only use Facebook and YouTube with intention.

If I disconnect my computer from the internet, within 20 minutes I see a pop-up window that says “Update Failed” “An unknown error occurred during the update process.” The icon at the upper-left corner of the popup window shows the X11 icon. I can close the window, but it will reappear a few minutes later.

Can I reconfigure X11 to only check for updates once a day? Or to be smart enough to wait until the operating system has internet access?

I’m using Fedora 43.

2

Your system seems to be set up to automatically check for updates, or something is open in the background that is doing so. The X11 icon is just a generic one that has nothing to do with what is being updated.

Someone with Fedora knowledge will need to chime in, as this probably isn’t a KDE setting.

3

I guess the distro sets the defaults, but the setting can be changed from within KDE world :slightly_smiling_face:

In the System Settings app, go to Software Update.

If you change “Update software” to “Manually”, the system won’t try to download updates unless you tell it to.

Unfortunately I don’t think there’s a “wait till I’m online” mode.

You could perhaps consider a browser extension like LeechBlockNG (available in the Firefox and Chrome stores) to implement this, rather than removing all internet access.

4

However the process which does the actual update check could consider whether there is a connection or not.

Slightly less obvious would be how to best behave if the connection goes down while updates are being actually downloaded.

5

That may stop Discover from checking updates, but it won’t stop any distro package-management-level automatic checking. Apt on *buntu does this, for example; their Software Sources utility can change this setting. The generic X11 icon makes me think this is not Plasma Discover showing the messaging.

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6

That’s a fair point - on reflection, I’d expect any Discover messages to show as Plasma notifications, not as popup windows.

On a default install of the Fedora KDE edition though, I don’t think there is any software auto-update process outside of Discover.

I wonder if one of OP’s installed apps tries to do a “self-update” outside of both Discover and Fedora’s package management.

Just to confirm, this is Fedora 43 KDE Plasma Desktop Edition, and not Kinoite (the immutable /atomic edition)?

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7

Thanks all,

Yes, this is Fedora 43 KDE Plasma Desktop Edition. I can confirm that my memory is correct by looking at “About this System” under System Settings.

In System Settings → Software Update, I see that “Update Software” is already set to “Manually”. So I’m going to operate under this above-described theory that one of my installed apps is doing something outside of Plasma Discover.

I’ll try to learn a little more about reading the OS logs, and see if I can determine what is triggering the message from that.

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8

When the pop-up is on screen with the generic X11 icon use this command to list all the X11 Windows. This may give you a clue to the name of the app that raised the pop-up.

xwininfo -tree -root
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9

Using the “xwininfo” command, I saw that pCloud and iDrive both use X11 on my computer. I downloaded updates to pCloud and disconnected my computer from the internet for a couple of hours and I don’t see that update failure anymore.

I wish I had done that experiment a little differently. It would have been better to turn pCloud off and on to reproduce the issue more consistently. But it so far looks like the old version of pCloud wasn’t prepared for inconsistent internet access.