Arch Linux

cubethethird

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Registered: 2016-01-25

Posts: 99

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Gnome asks to install updates after reboot. Is this necessary?

Gnome prompts the user to reboot in order to install certain updates. As far as I can tell this is a security feature put in place for it's usage with Fedora. What I haven't been able to tell is whether or not this functionality is needed with Arch. Upon rebooting to install, there is some logging showing things being installed, so I imagine it's doing something. It's however the only desktop environment that I know to do this. So my question is, is this worth having, and is there a way to disable it?

ooo

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Registered: 2013-04-10

Posts: 1,638

Re: Gnome asks to install updates after reboot. Is this necessary?

First of all, it's not really gnome that's doing this. I assume you're using gnome-software or gnome-packagekit, which are using PackageKit for package transactions, and I imagine the same thing should happen with any other package manager that uses PackageKit as backend. If you used pacman to update your system under gnome, it wouldn't require you to reboot.

If I'm not mistaken, you're talking about "offline updates" feature in packagekit, and its benefits for arch are the same as for any other distribution. You can read more about the advantages here and here.

You should be able to disable it by rebuilding the packagekit package with '--disable-offline-update' configure flag.

cubethethird

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Registered: 2016-01-25

Posts: 99

Website

Re: Gnome asks to install updates after reboot. Is this necessary?

Ah that might explain it then. I do have gnome-software installed, though I haven't really used it. Hopefully removing it will work around this all together. Seeing as I've always done updates directly through pacman, I expect it was redundantly installing those updates upon reboot.