I would like to migrate my parents to Linux and since I am using KDE Neon, this is the main contender. I foresee problems with the current update method:

1. They don't understand/lack the technical knowledge to act on notifications about available updates.
2. They will not have root privileges and I don't want to have to remotely run updates every few days manually.
3. KDE programms break after an update until you have restarted the KDE session. They will not understand this.

Therefore I would like to know whether it is possible to have KDE Neon behave like Windows so that it updates whenever you shutdown the computer.

Hi!

There are some possibilities to get updates installed. I would use the unattended-upgrades script from Debian/Ubuntu to get all security updates installed automatically. This can be configured like described in the DebianWiki.

Automatic updates could be a problem anyway. Keep a ssh-access to the parent-pc to be able to repair stuff remote.

I know unattended-upgrades, but I don't think it can defer the installation of upgrades to a manually scheduled reboot. Additionaly I wold need a GUI message to say something like "Updates are being installed". Otherwise they will just assume the computer is malfunctioning because it is taking so long to shutdown.

So AFAIU unattended-upgrades is solution for server environments and does not apply to desktop computers.

It's not available as built-in functionality but you could write a simple scripty to runs omething like

pkcon update --only-download
pkcon offline-trigger

This will conduct an upgrade on the next startup. Alternatively I suppose one could write power-off to /var/lib/PackageKit/offline-update-action to instead apply the update on shutdown. If you want to pull a btrfs/zfs snapshot I believe you could anchor a systemd unit before system-update.target and/or packagekit-offline-update.service to do that.

I have been using for years a script to update at beginning of some user's session, unattended of course.
To be unattended, I give permissions to some users (one group's users) using sudoers rules to update using - y option (without asking)
The script evaluates if the computer is under home's WiFi net to avoid updating in others nets (as university's one, for example).
I haven't had problems with applications because updating.
It'd be easy to start the script when a session is closing, I think, and to shut down computer when update has be done, using shutdown command.
if you or anyone is interested in my scripts no problem for publicating here.
Regards

apachelogger wrote:Alternatively I suppose one could write power-off to /var/lib/PackageKit/offline-update-action to instead apply the update on shutdown.

I don't understand this. I don't have this file on my system and /var/lib/PackageKit/ only contains transactions.db. Is there some way to add custom scripts here? A google search didn't yield anything useful.