Unattended upgrades

General Discussions
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I almost thought I was back on Windoze the other day. I went to shut down my laptop and unattended upgrades stopped me. I have had this laptop for over 6 months and upgrade often so don’t get hit by that very often. Actually in the past I have always remove unattended upgrades.

Do you like and appreciate unattended upgrades, or do you remove it?

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Weekly Forum Summary
2

Absolutely not and habitually yes. :slight_smile:

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3

On an LTS or very stable distro and most non-server installs it can be useful. I wrote a bit about it in these articles:

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4

On my desktop and worklaptop: no unattended upgrades
Everywhere else: yes, I keep unattended upgrades

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Hi, @Jymm :slight_smile:

You wrote:

I may be in the minority in this discussion topic (at least, considering the replies, so far), but yes: I do like and appreciate unattended upgrades, in my laptop computers and Virtual Machines (that have “Ubuntu MATE” or other flavors of Ubuntu) and so I leave them turned on.

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6

I need to visually observe updates to spot when things could go wrong … and intervene immediately when necessary.

I had one experience where I had to revert back to an earlier version of one package, because the newer version had an interface style which went “full-icon” (no text) which I have an absolute aversion to!

Since then, ALWAYS disable unattended upgrades.

I manually ask to mark all updates in Synaptic, then look up release notes for critical Apps to see what is impacted, and uncheck the ones I don’t want to apply.

I only use the “version freeze” when I am absolutely determined to never update an App, which is not often. For now only Chromium is in that category.

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7

I have blocked two: Thunderbird-snap and Transmission-gtk

  1. I installed the latest Thunderbird ESR from the official mozilla PPA
  2. I compiled the most recent Transmission against GTK3
    ( because the gnomified GTK4 version doesn’t fsck-ing work in the background!
    GTK4 handicapped the app functionally, deliberately and severely because backgrounding doesn’t fit GNOME’s misguided fashion vision :face_vomiting:)
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8

Are you blocking Thunderbird-snap or setting priority for Debian-based package?

Thank you for that heads-up. I will be sure to remove and lock the Transmission, and perform local compile as you did.

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9

I was still on an old Thunderbird version and I could only ‘dist-upgrade’ to “snapperbird”, which I refused.
So I did not do the dist upgrade but added the official thunderbird PPA
That took care of things automatically. :+1:

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10

I do not like unattended upgrades, although I know they’re useful . I want to know what is going to be installed, so I set up updates to notify me so I can take a look and then install them.

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11

I am not a fan of unattended/automatic upgrades. I have a couple of dozen systems around the house, mostly QEMU-KVM guests (virtual machines). For the most part alphabetically, each day of the month, I select the next system, and perform the following:

  1. backup
  2. update
  3. reboot

I have seen enough issues with manual upgrades of various platforms to know that automatic is not acceptable risk for me.

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12

I can see for servers, but they seem unneeded for desktops. Maybe they should have to be enabled instead of disabled?

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