Mint Updates - Don't want to be notified that often!

[joelpomales]

Hello to all.

Recently switched from Ubuntu 20.04 LTS to Mint for a change of pace and also because Mint has some things OOTB for which I have to really tinker with in Ubuntu / Gnome.

I do have an issue. The update manager icon always appears even if I've told it in my preferences that I want it to check every seven days. If there's an update, no matter how minuscule, it will appear. How can I best modify this behavior so I can be alerted every week, or every other week? In Ubuntu this wasn't an issue.

Thanks!

[JoeFootball]

The update manager icon always appears ...

If I'm understanding correctly, in Update Manager, under Preferences > Options > Interface, enable the "Only show a tray icon when updates are available or in case of errors" option.

Also note that a new install of any distro is likely to have many updates, so I'd think that current behavior wouldn't be the ongoing disposition.

[SMG]

How can I best modify this behavior so I can be alerted every week, or every other week?

Please let us know which version of Linux Mint you are running.

Also, please provide a screenshot of your current Preferences tab in Update Manager (Edit > Preferences). That is probably the best and fastest way for us to help you determine if there is just a setting which needs changes or something else is happening. You can use an image-hosting site such as imgur or ibb if the image is too large to attach.

[joelpomales]

Here you go.

[SMG]

Here you go.Screenshot from 2021-10-28 14-16-50.png

I understand those would be the settings to use.

What are the "little update" you are seeing? I wonder if maybe there is a similarity in the type that might give us an idea why this is happening. I did check the GitHub for mintupdate and did not see any reports of an issue like the one you are describing.

[joelpomales]

Funny. Just now I logged in to that machine and it says that it has one update to "webkit2gtk".

And that's the thing. On plain Ubuntu 20.04 I can tell it to only notify me every other week and it will, as opposed to Mint which is telling me every day, or every other day, there's something.

It's probably my OCD, too.

[SMG]

Funny. Just now I logged in to that machine and it says that it has one update to "webkit2gtk".

I actually had several updates today. I update as soon as they come through and I was getting a sense of deja vu in that the icon kept showing I had updates after knowing I'd already run an update. Looking back at the update history listing there were three today.

That package was one of them, but it was the middle one with respect to when I started my computer and when I saw it.

I just ran journalctl -b | grep -i mintupdate on my computer to see what the timing activations looked to be for Update Manager. I have my preferences set for the defaults which are to refresh the list of updates 10 minutes after startup and then every two hours.

I see the following times which I correlated to what I believe happened at that time. I was not necessarily at my computer when mintupdate ran, so there is a lag between when the update came and when I installed it.

Code: Select all

 6:57 - when I logged in
 7:07 - 10 minutes after login (the first check according to preferences)
 7:10 - downloaded and installed the Nemo update
 8:57 - two hours after login (the next check according to preferences)
10:58 - two hour check
11:08 - downloaded and installed the webkit update
12:58 - two hour check
14:58 - two hour check
16:58 - two hour check
17:02 - downloaded and installed the nautilus update
18:59 - two hour check

Maybe there is something in your information which might help pin-point what is happening. The more troubleshooting we can do ahead of time, the more helpful it will be if you end up filing a bug report.

[missmoondog]

why would you NOT want to get the updates when they are released? as often as mint has security updates to it and you want to go a whole week without updating just doesn't make any sense to me. i could understand that if we were talking about windows and it's super slow process of downloading and installing updates, but mint only takes a few seconds to update if you keep up with them.

sorry about not offering any help