Hi,

Just wanted to say, I don't like offline updates at all.. Updating some application requires now a system reboot? Who even approved that? Huge step backwards in my opinion.

K

Kokos wrote:Who even approved that?

I did.

apachelogger wrote:

Kokos wrote:Who even approved that?

I did.

Don't get me wrong, I really aprecciate all the work you do to KDE, but on this one I must say it was a wrong decision, but just because it's the default and there's no "easy" option to turn it off. When that "easy" GUI option is gonna be ready, it would be just another option. But now, the way it is... Not nice.

Before the off-line updates, one restart and you were done, with off-line updates it makes you restart twice...

Offline updates are great for systems with nvidia prop. drivers. With bigger system updates I often got "kde hangup" - nothing worked - reboot.
Automatic offline updates can be great for grandma/grandpa PC.

But, for PCs with open source drivers offline-update are mostly annoying only.
My first offline-update try was a disaster, it did not worked. I had to run pkcon update from console.

The GUI switch to turn offline-updates of is very important.
Please implement it ASAP, best with next update
It could be next to manual-automatic sw update switch.

Would it be possible to apply the updates before the reboot actually occurs? as things stand, you currently need to reboot twice. I had an issue where I applied updates before I went to bed one evening and promptly forgot I needed to reboot again for the install process to work. The next morning I had to wait 20 minutes for the updates to install

Why not to make updates when you switch you computer off? It is OK to update system when it's not going to be used for a while.
But it's not the best solution to make PC unusable up to 10 minutes when you need to use your computer.

I like the option of doing off-line upgrades. I keep it enabled on my laptop to follow the evolution of the feature. So far it seems to be in early beta stage. One update of two 400K libs required two restarts. Starting November 2021 or so, I have had it hang on reboot multiple times, requiring REISUB to force another restart. Updates using apt or pkcon have been trouble free so far.

This feature adds nothing of value to me personally. However, I can see a future where it becomes robust and reliable and automatically does this in the background just like Windows does. It could be a benefit to a non-technical user.

Just keep it optional.

Sony VAIO VPCZ2190X i7-2620M 8G
2x128G SSD BIOS RAID-0
Insyde BIOS R0173H5 05/21/2012
Dual boot WX

On Kubuntu offline updates are off by default.
There is a simple checkbox under settings to turn on.
This seems to be a good way to implement this option.
Interestingly under the checkbox offline updates are "strongly advised"

I am giving it a try because I tend to reboot my computer daily.

I am now running KDE neon as a test on my local machine for deploying Neon for my NFPO. Those machines are not top notch and not frequently used. I noticed in my test, that the off-line updates run with quite some time between them. A result is that the updates are quite large and huge when you missed a update moment (ctrl-c at boot of not using the machine that day). In this topic I saw this command:

apachelogger wrote:

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kwriteconfig5 --file discoverrc --group Software --key UseOfflineUpdates --type bool false

Is it possible to run a command like this one to change the update interval/frequency (like every other day) to run smaller and faster updates?

First of all, sorry for my English. Second, I will not go into all that "I was tired of annoying windows updates, that's the reason I switch to GNU/Linux", Albenson said everything I had on my mind about that. And third, this is my first post (or should I said reply, I'm not sure) on a Linux Forum, sorry for anything in advance.

I've been back and forth from Windows to Linux for a long time. Then a few years on Windows until two years ago, when I decided to try Archlinux. It was painful but worth it . I even try Linux From Scratch but I wasn't able to compile it successfully. It was worth it too, I keep it on my check list.

I had heard of KDE Neo for a while. I ignore it because my days of testing distro, after distro, after distro had ended, but a week ago I saw a review and I decided to test it. It's definitely a keeper, it have the best of two worlds: Ubuntu and KDE. IMO, is the perfect candidate for the Windows/Linux transition.

Now, before that (I hope) not too long introduction, I will go into the topic. I found apachelogger's solution to my problem:

apachelogger wrote:

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kwriteconfig5 --file discoverrc --group Software --key UseOfflineUpdates --type bool false

I'm being told discover might grow a gui option for this somewhere since you asked for it.

And I said "hey, can I tweak some file instead of a command full of options?", you known, because "everything in Linux is a file". So I keep digging and found this solution., I test it, and it works. So, as always, I take the time to make a Sed script.

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sed -i.orig '/UseOfflineUpdates/ s/true/false/' /etc/xdg/discoverrc

I test it a few times to see if I can switch the option with that script and worked perfectly.

Then, I wanted to try apachelogger's solution as a second workaround. Not only it didn't worked, now I can't use the Sed script anymore, I'm stuck to the interface. That's a bummer. Now if I, for some reason, have to restore my settings, I have to do it manually.

If someone have a solution to this, I will really appreciate it.

For those who likes to read:

The official position of Freedesktop.org is towards offline updates. Not only that, they propose it as a standard feature. However, reading this document, I realize that it have to do with Systemd's integration.

I'm not an expert, but it seems to me that Systemd wants to turn Linux into a Windows Desktop by controlling everything. One of the Linux guidelines that always helps me to solve a problem (not only on a technical level, but in life) is "Do just one thing and do it right". Maybe if everyone worked only in his own stuff, the things each one is good at, we wouldn't have people messing around all over the place. Like Linus Torvalds once said "Don't touch the user's space!!!". Maybe Lennart Poettering shouldn't be touching the Kernel space.

I heard somewhere that Systemd is the "evolution" of Linux. Maybe on the wild, where survival of the fittest is the rule, that therm is right, but in a community, is all about consensus. The beauty of the Linux community, IMO, is that you can pick a distro just because you agree with its philosophy, everything that distro lacks is your responsability, if you take it.

chiefbromden wrote:And I said "hey, can I tweak some file instead of a command full of options?", you known, because "everything in Linux is a file". So I keep digging and found this solution., I test it, and it works. So, as always, I take the time to make a Sed script.

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sed -i.orig '/UseOfflineUpdates/ s/true/false/' /etc/xdg/discoverrc

I test it a few times to see if I can switch the option with that script and worked perfectly.

Then, I wanted to try apachelogger's solution as a second workaround. Not only it didn't worked, now I can't use the Sed script anymore, I'm stuck to the interface. That's a bummer. Now if I, for some reason, have to restore my settings, I have to do it manually.

If someone have a solution to this, I will really appreciate it.

Hey, I understand your feelings.

To start with: for such a noticeable change I think it wasn't properly announced or introduced. IMHO it should have been opt-in in the first place and eventually with a major release or something make it opt-out for new installations or something like that. In any case never without a proper GUI option to enable/disable it!! Which was the way this feature first appeared.

Also: I have a couple of issues with offline updates:
- Start the computer and having to wait for 2 reboots is just lame. It HAS to be a better way of doing things. On a personal note I have an HTPC at home with auto-update and offline updates enabled for "hands-free" operation and I was really ashamed in front of friends and even my wife every time we had to sit through two complete boots to start watching a film. I ended deactivating it, of course, and having to update and do maintenance via Ansible (or manual ssh session).
- Why even a complete reboot? I'm pretty sure a session restart should be enough for most things. Add the "soft approach" of notify the user the recommendation of quickly logout/login again to refresh the session.

Maybe I'm just an ignorant and the matter is probably more complicated than that but anyway. My 2 angry cents.

As for your problem with discoverrc I think you should change ~/.config/discoverrc instead of /etc/xdg/discoverrc as the former is your personal configuration which probably overrides whatever /etc/xdg/discoverrc says.

pandiloko wrote:As for your problem with discoverrc I think you should change ~/.config/discoverrc instead of /etc/xdg/discoverrc as the former is your personal configuration which probably overrides whatever /etc/xdg/discoverrc says.

Thank you, that's the answer I was waiting for.

I'm planing on maintaining a couple of computers, that means migrating to something like KDE Neon all of them. I known that is not a distro, but I've been waiting something like this for a long time. I'm very reacting to unwanted software installing without having a good way to avoid it (with a few exceptions, pretty much all the Linux distros comes with a bunch of pre-installed programs) and I like adding apps on demand. That's one thing. The other have a relation with your first issue:

pandiloko wrote:- Start the computer and having to wait for 2 reboots is just lame. It HAS to be a better way of doing things. On a personal note I have an HTPC at home with auto-update and offline updates enabled for "hands-free" operation and I was really ashamed in front of friends and even my wife every time we had to sit through two complete boots to start watching a film. I ended deactivating it, of course, and having to update and do maintenance via Ansible (or manual ssh session).

I've been trying to convince people to adopt Linux, and those little quirks (unexpected quirks) doesn't help. I remember that my sister gave me back a computer that I had lent her just because she wasn't able to get Zoom running on it. Or my wife installing a lot apps that she only used once, and then when you have to backup /home you have 5 Gb on the .config folder and you don't know why.
As for your second problem:

paniloko wrote:- Why even a complete reboot? I'm pretty sure a session restart should be enough for most things. Add the "soft approach" of notify the user the recommendation of quickly logout/login again to refresh the session.

One of the things Linux is known of is its ability to run indefinitely without rebooting. In fact, there is a GNU project that would make "[...]possible to develop and test new [Hurd] kernel components without rebooting the machine.". That project has been around since 1990. So my question is: Why rebooting TWICE?.

I found a first guess looking for a solution to another problem last week. Maybe it have to do with where the programs are installed:

Historically /bin, /sbin, /lib had the purpose to contain the utilities to mount /usr. [But] This role can now be taken by the initramfs. Because the initramfs knows, where to find the root partition (which includes /etc) [...]
Source

I don't have enough technical knowledge to support that claim, but if that's the case Oracle has implemented a solution on 2012. In plain English, they separate Operating System-specific files from Host-specific files. It's my dream come true. Developers making what they do best: making awesome software; and [others like] me maintaining it. The hardest thing a user should know how to do is:

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git clone https://github.com/my-developer-friend/awesomeapp.git
pushd awesomeapp
make
make install