I’m somewhat stuck, currently.
I want to set up a system for an user without any experience with computers. And I want to be very sure system updates are installed completely automatic without me ever needing to check for that.
So what I did was enabling “Automatic” in the Gnome Software settings which, so I thought, should automatically download updates which then are installed on system shutdown.
If I go to the “Updates” tab in Gnome Software, then several updates are listed together with a “Download” button in the upper left (which I did not click as what I want is automatic updates). One of the updates (Firefox 153 to 155) is even listed as being critical.
I had this PC running for several hours, now and did a few reboots where in the window there also was a checkbox pre-checked for installing already downloaded pending updates.
But after every reboot I still have the same pending updates list in Gnome Software and not even the critical Firefox update is installed.
In this state I can not hand over this PC. How can I check that automatic updates are working? Just letting the machine idle doesn’t seem to do much…
You might look at setting up/enabling dnf automatic:
It’s got a lot of options but it works nicely once you set it up.
You can have it email you when it applies updates, decide if it should
reboot for kernel updates, etc.
I guess you can not avoid to involve the user to interact with the system and learn to read notifications and also act when he gets an error.
The Gnome auto update works, it just takes a while. This makes sense, that the system is not updating within every change we make. This way the system is still working when there is an error/regression with an update.
If you want it to make the experience with zero involvement, you would need to regularly connect over ssh/rdp to see if everything works.
I have booted the prepared PC today, again, and had it running for two hours, then performed shutdown with the “Install downloaded updates” checkbox checked. No updates happened.
How can I know that Gnome auto update actually does something? It behaves like totally broken.
If everything was done correctly, you might have hitted a bug. GNOME Software is supposed to perform the updates upon reboot. If you’d like to troubleshoot the issue, you might want to give us a few more details, e.g.:
system information
output of dnf update --refresh --assumeno
whether there are also Flatpaks installed.
From personal experience, I can tell that automatic updates with GNOME Software work very well in Fedora Silverblue, if atomic desktops are an option. The OSTree image is updated regularly, and upon reboot the user is on the new system, without any installation downtime, given that the deployment of the new image already took place in the background. Flatpaks are updated live.
What kind of system information do you need?
There are no flatpaks installed.
I’ll fetch the dnf info in a few minutes and update my post. Would be nice to at least have the option to get Fedora Workstation working reliably.
In theory “Fedora Silverblue” could be an option. But probably this deserves a new thread, then.
Can I add custom kernel parameters? I do need this, as the mainboard has issues if the psmouse module is allowed to load. As this is built in for the Fedora kernel, the only option is to tell the kernel via paramter to not initialize the psmouse driver.
Does this behave more like a “rolling release”? Meaning software dynamically updates without having to do the major update once a year?
If you’re confortable with the shared information, you can provide the ouput of fpaste, since it’s installed by default, e.g. by running fpaste --sysinfo-short --printonly | wl-copy, which will copy the output to clipboard, and paste it here as preformatted text. Otherwise you can install inxi and post the output of inxi -Fzxx.
Also, after a restart with a failed offline update you can check the journal and post the output here, e.g. using journalctl -b -1 -p 4 | grep -i "gnome-software".
Yes, you can set kernel parameters on Silverblue with rpm-ostree kargs.
No, not really. The server-side images are built from the same repositories used on traditional Fedora desktops. It might be perceived that way because upgrading to a major version is almost the same as doing a regular upgrade.
Sure, if you want to give it a try and have questions, a new thread is advisable.
