On a slow internet connection, I can wait a long time at:
When I want to leave my PC updating whilst I’m gone, unless I’ve pre-prepared for this, I’m forced to wait until it’s instantiated the package list.
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That’s a good one for bugs.kde.org.
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@hunterx, thanks. Reported at bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=503395#c0.
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Discover relies on apt/packagekit… and automated downloads can be achieved using unattended-upgrades for security updates (default, I think, on Linux Mint anyway).
Scripts with apt update/upgrade downloads can certainly fetch updates without installing them.
You can set a cron job to pre-download. I’m not sure if Discover using packagekit will conflict with apt though… but I think it’s not the best way to manage the task.
For most users, unattended-upgrades is a better tool. Linux Mint has their own way of doing this, and I think it’s just a mess to try to do too much in Discover.
If Discover used distribution backends (i.e. apt, flatpak, snapd or pacman) then I’d say it’s a great plan.
@ben2talk, my very dubious comprehension of the backend architecture is that native plugins are utilised wherever available, and PackageKit is utilised otherwise. I have no citation for this.
If unattended upgrades were sufficient, every time I go to the “Updates” tab, I’d see none. As it is, I usually do, and I don’t want to leave my PC on indefinitely so that it can install them whenever it eventually feels like it.
Yeah. I’ve got one (best to run as su):
#!/usr/bin/env bash
flatpak update && \
sudo snap refresh && \
sudo dnf5 upgrade --offline -y && \
sudo dnf5 offline reboot
However, it doesn’t encompass plasma add-ons.
Discover does not use any native plugins. It uses PackageKit which is the front-end for most popular package managers. It allows apps to avoid any platform-specific behaviour, so that Discover could work on most distros.
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So here we have some partial truths, but this statement is misleading in very important aspects.
Discover relies on distribution specific backends to translate it’s commands into actions… so on Ubuntu, it uses pkcon with libpackagekit-apt and interacts with apt.
So it indirectly depends on native plugins via packagekit… so this claim is giving a false impression that no platform-specific components are involved and this is one reason y ou cannot say that Discover is thus going to work on most distributions.
Package abstracts direct interaction with package managers… it still depends on packagekit’s backends for each individual distribution.
For example, with Arch it uses pacman… but requires the support of libpackagekit-pacman. It’s compatibility is conditional…
Backends does not mean Platform Agnostic.
Fedora’s dnf has much more advanced and granular options than packagekit’s DNF backend.
Also, there’s a performance trade-off… so the best you can say is that Discover is bloatttt.
Certainly with Manjaro, it caused many more problems than it solved… the percieved ‘easy tool’ was best improved when I completely purged it.