GNOME Software 3.30 Will Automatically Update Flatpaks By Default

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GNOME Software 3.30 Will Automatically Update Flatpaks By Default

The GNOME Software center for installing and updating of programs will begin automatically installing updates with the upcoming GNOME 3.30 release albeit limited to sandboxed Flatpak programs...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-3.30-Auto-Updates-Flatpak

[Iolaum]

Congratulation to the gnome developers for allowing users to cancel automatic updates so we can update when we want at custom times. Maybe now Canonical reconsiders and allows this for snaps as well.

[pracedru]

I can see the idea in automatic updates for security patches etc.
But i really would not like to suddenly see new features in the programs that i use..
I'd like to update when im ready.

[tildearrow]

I wish they made polls before applying changes to default settings...

firmware updates... ...but not to go ahead and deploy those updates by default.

Great. Especially considering the amount of damage that a failed firmware update may cause...

[Marc Driftmeyer]

I can see the idea in automatic updates for security patches etc.
But i really would not like to suddenly see new features in the programs that i use..
I'd like to update when im ready.

Than don't install flatpak version and wait for updates from your distro.

[jacob]

I can see the idea in automatic updates for security patches etc.
But i really would not like to suddenly see new features in the programs that i use..
I'd like to update when im ready.

I don't mind getting new features, unless the new feature is a complete redesign of the UI that sends you searching for your functions for 15 minutes at a time.
What concerns me is automatic updates from a stable and debugged release (say 3.6.27) to a brand new branch (like 4.0.0) that may have just came out of beta.

[EarthMind]

Isn't that the job of the distro to handle updates? People deliberately choose if they want a stable distro or a rolling release one that provides every single update immediately after upstream release (and testing).

[ssokolow]

I don't mind getting new features, unless the new feature is a complete redesign of the UI that sends you searching for your functions for 15 minutes at a time.
What concerns me is automatic updates from a stable and debugged release (say 3.6.27) to a brand new branch (like 4.0.0) that may have just came out of beta.

Agreed. My main concerns are that and nag messages.

For example, years ago, I ripped out the update notifier used by Lubuntu and replaced it with a home-made hack because they'd removed the hidden config option to turn off daily "Please reboot to update your kernel" nags. (To this day, I'm still slowly working on improving persistence in my applications to the point where restarting my desktop session doesn't require ~15 minutes of putting things back together again.)

...or, just a few hours ago, I experienced some data loss (and reported the bug responsible) and lost my progress on several non-resumable downloads after Firefox started replacing all new page loads/reloads with a "Please click this button to restart to apply updates" page and then forced a browser restart while I was trying various options to circumvent said "feature".

I responded by turning off automatic download of updates and, if that's not sufficient, I'll lock some dummy URL into app.update.url using user.js and then write another update notifier of my own design... until I finish migrating my data out of my 52 ESR profile and can start using the Ubuntu PPA builds for Developer Edition without colliding over /usr/bin/firefox. I'm told that those don't have the problem.

UPDATE: Apparently, that page means "we've already updated your browser and we can't let you open new content processes because the mismatch between the old chrome process and the new content processes will probably cause the chrome process to crash", and setting app.update.auto to false ("Check for updates but let you choose to install them") should resolve the problem as long as I never use the distro-provided Firefox builds.

[ZeroPointEnergy]

I think flatpak for open source software is just stupid. There is no real reason to ship it that way.

I can see the appeal for proprietary software like games who often have trouble after a while because for some reason userland ABIs break all the time (which is the actual problem that should be solved). But so far I tried to install a cuple of games over flatpack and it never worked. There was always something breaking down and it is really hard to debug something you have never even seen to work properly.

So it all sounds good on the paper but I will probably ignore it again for a couple of years until they figured out how to deliver on their idea.

[ElectricPrism]

What could go wrong???