It’s near midnight, you have finished work for the day and shutdown the system. Then you remember one last thing you need to do. You fire up your machine only to be greeted with a message that you have 3.8 gigs of updates some of which are urgent security fixes. Do you spend the next 30 minutes faffing with updates, complete your work or both?
Just a suggestion for an optional method: When you shutdown the system it does a quick update check and installs any fixes/updates and then completes the shutdown. Next time you start up you’re probably good to go.
NB I’m sure there are fifteen good reasons why this won’t work but it’s always worth asking.
I am totally against automatic updates, in any form, unless they are opt-in preferences for the user (or admin, for multi-user systems). That being said, I would choose to have the automatic update check happen when I first login instead of at the end of the day.
This already exists, if your distribution supports the Software Update KCM (like Fedora) then there’s an automatic update option. The updates will be downloaded immediately, and then installed on next boot.
@redstrate Offline updates is good, but as @PeteDA says if download updates before shutdown, and you need use the computer again because last time job, system will install the updates.
Unfortunately, too many distros configure auto-update checks, and possibly even auto-installing after auto-downloading the packages, as opt-out instead of opt-in. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to turn this junk off, especially on GNOME-based systems.
As a completely optional, opt-in only setup, I’m all for it.