How to automatically download updates in the background but only applying them at reboot/boot?

Ask Fedora
1

Hi,

Need to bring this topic up again.

Is it possible to set Fedora to automatically download updates in the background but only applying them at reboot/boot?

The reason I need this is that a friend who is using Ubuntu currently is shutting down his laptop at any given time. This broke the Ubuntu update process a few times and leaves him with a broken package manager.

To avoid this, it seems a good idea to have updates applied only when the laptop starts.

Any idea how to set this?

2

If you are happy to do this from the command line then this should do what you want:

This will download the RPMs:

sudo dnf offline-upgrade download

And this will reboot the system and apply the updates as the system comes back up:

sudo dnf offline-upgrade reboot

A normal reboot will not apply the updates, you get to decide when that happens.

See man dnf-offline-upgrade for details.

1 Like
3

My understanding is that the default on the Fedora Workstation and KDE (which use Gnome-software and Discover as their “update apps”), both do offline upgrades by default. They download updates in the background (or as the user to download them) and then will update the system on the next boot in a environment before rebooting again for the user. This has been the way they’ve done things for a while: