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.

This automatic installing of updates by default is being restricted to Flatpaks. This is being at least initially limited to Flatpak packages since the auto-updating of the Linux distribution's host packages can lead to problems as experimented with in the past and by some vendors. But GNOME Software 3.30 will download automatically firmware updates, OSTree content, and package updates, but not to go ahead and deploy those updates by default.

For those not wanting to deal with automatic updates, the functionality can be disabled via the update preferences.

More details on the default GNOME Software 3.30 update behavior is outlined in this blog post today by Red Hat's Richard Hughes.

GNOME 3.30 is scheduled to ship on 5 September.