It seems Silverblue will automatically check for updates every day, and since there seems to be updates daily, it will download, update and deploy every day, even though I might reboot only once a week. This seems a bit wasteful. I’m still interested in having automatic updates, but is there a way to tell PackageKit (or whoever’s in charge) to only do this once a week?
As a side-note, even though I can see a new deployment is available (via rpm-ostree status), I do not get any notification on my desktop encouraging me to reboot. I wonder if that’s the expected behavior, because what if the user doesn’t reboot the machine for months?
gnome-software is what upgrades the system automatically in the background. As far as I am aware, there isn’t way to change the upgrade-check frequency (at least not via the GUI).
That being said - you are safe to just leave it to do it’s thing. The pending image gets added to so it’s not like it will be downloading the same image all over again and reboot whenever you are ready.
The preferences of GNOME Software should have an option to disable the automatic check as shown in the screenshot.
There’s also the option to disable the automatic update notifications (also shown); I think that probably controls the presence of the reboot notification.
FWIW, this screenshot was captured on a Fedora Silverblue 42 virtual machine.
From what I’m seeing, the notification is a post-reboot “Updates have been installed” notification and not a pre-reboot “You need to reboot to install updates”.
Given how big Fedora Atomic updates are, daily updates can be annoying.
It might be out dated but this is a 2022 quote from the last feature request for a user menu for update frequency
For lower-end systems, simply downloading an update can grind the desktop to a stutter mess. This was very apparent when I tried a fresh install of Silverblue on a dual-core system as the first thing the GNOME Software did was bump CPU usage to 80% and download 2GiBs in the background, during which GNOME Software was “stuck” at the checking for updates screen, leaving me unable to even search for a flatpak.
I see, thank you for the link. So the solution would be to switch to “Manual” mode and setup my own systemd timer which calls gnome-software --autoupdate with whatever interval I prefer.
Checkout the existing timers/services providied by the preinstalled rpm-ostree-automatic package. Its not very desktop friendly but it may work for your needs.
Right but this won’t update the flatpaks. I think gnome-software --autoupdate would be the closest thing to the “Automatic” mode that I have right now.
In the past I used to upgrade the OSTree image and the Flatpaks via the terminal, but now I prefer the convenience of automatic updates via GNOME Software. Except for old systems, I don’t really notice the updates taking place. The advantage is that whenever I need to reboot, I know that I’ll be on an up-to-date image. Otherwise I reboot once a week.
AFAIK, new deployments are created based on the staging deployment, so (except for metered connections) there aren’t that many resources wasted.
This is set up for a fixed 2-week interval, IIRC. If you reboot at least once a week, you don’t get the notification.
