Hi all,
I was asking myself to use only GNOME Software and its own deb package update feature. As far as I remember that’s the Debian way?
Is that possible in Ubuntu (Plucky) to safely remove update-manager/notifier? I recently saw that’s possible without dependencies issues.
What would be the drawbacks of such a change?
Well, 25.04 is still in the development phase, so why not try and see what happens? The worst is that you break your system 
Having said that, what’s the point of uninstalling it? You can turn off the notifications if you like, if you prefer to manually check for updates every day.
I’m asking about the point is to having it installed…
Why does Ubuntu still uses another update mechanism than Fedora or Debian?
If you use GNOME Software (and I do now, but I confess switch between Software Center + Firmware Updater snaps and GNOME Software), you get a duplicated feature.
And…:
I don’t see any complete disabling.
Moving to the Support and Help category.
This discussion seems about learning, not about improving an Ubuntu project or Team.
The Debian way is to use what works best for you, and to avoid blocking what works best for somebody else. There may be more than one “right” answer.
Recall that Ubuntu’s defaults are oriented to new users who, being new, are not expected to know how to manually manage apt, how Debian-based archives/repositories work, and other important maintenance details. A drawback for new users would be that learning curve.
I have used Ubuntu for years with Update Manager, and for years without. A skilled user should be able to do both.
The question’s phrasing in English implies that different distros should use the same ‘update mechanism’. That may-or-may-not be a valid assumption, or perhaps that was not an intended message. Perhaps you might explain your reasoning a bit more.
I don’t know what plain Debian uses. Well, obviously, if you’re using the command line, it’s going to be apt or apt-get. But I don’t know what Debian uses for the GUI equivalent.
It certainly wouldn’t use the Fedora method, because Fedora doesn’t use DEBs.
You will likely find several different GUI update mechanisms. For example, I sometimes use Synaptic on Ubuntu. I don’t know Pop!_OS, but it likely has yet another mechanism despite being derived from Ubuntu, because it’s quite different.
Ubuntu’s version also takes into account Ubuntu’s phased releases, which might answer your question as to why Ubuntu uses what it does.
That does not.
We all have seen that Ubuntu’s desktop experience has become closer to upstream GNOME over the years.
So why not for updater software? Again, that’s not “why should we not doing like that” but “why are we not using the default GNOME way” (aka using GNOME Software updater tab).
In some of VM I used, I saw the Debian & Fedora way (yes I know Fedora does not use deb packages). I found the updates quite easy & sleek, even though I do not have a long experience in Debian & Fedora. So I really don’t understand the beginner-user point here. To manage debian repositories, I do use software-properties-gtk and that’s another topic. Though I don’t know if Debian uses an updater background shared with Ubuntu.
Besides Ubuntu 24.04 I have Ubuntu 25.04 and Debian trixie/sid with GNOME desktop.
On all I use apt via terminal, synaptic and gnome-software.
On Ubuntu if you don’t want duplicate for snaps you may install gnome-software with:
sudo apt install gnome-software gnome-software-plugin-snap- gnome-software-plugin-flatpak
Note the addition of plugin-flatpak to manage flatpaks and the removal of plugin-snap adding a minus sign after …snap
For the record, default Debian with the Gnome desktop just uses Gnome Software for updates.
Yes, I checked this again yesterday by installing a Trixie VM.
That’s a very sleek gnomish solution.
Drawback: package updates are installed on restart/shutdown, not immediately like Ubuntu does (with eventually a restart requested prompt).
I think the simplest answer (Occam’s Razor approach) to this is Ubuntu is not Debian. It may be derived from Debian, but it’s not Debian. It doesn’t have to act like Debian and, even though development policies are largely the same, it doesn’t have to be identical to Debian.
So, what I would do first is, in your mind, throw-out the notion that Ubuntu is Debian because that’s simply false.
I never wrote Ubuntu is Debian or should be Debian.
I was simply asking for what tells my initial post + why does Ubuntu use its own updater layer rather than Debian/Fedora (again: aka use GNOME Software interface).
I never implied that you did, but just because someone does something one way doesn’t mean we have to.
There’s a few idiosyncrasies that update-manager handles that GNOME Software does not. For instance, it uses apt as its backend, whereas GNOME Software uses packagekit as its backend. apt is much better at resolving issues than packagekit, so that’s preferred.
Because when we started there was no such thing in 2004, there was neither a graphical update tool nor any end-user friendly gui way of installing/removing packages (ignoring synaptic here which is rather an admin tool but definitely nothing my mother would get along with)… it has grown into what you know today but was initially an Ubuntu invention, way ahead of the other distros (well, suse had YAST, but again something my mom wouldn’t have been able to use), why would we drop it ?
EDIT: for the historians, here is a (re)design document from 2005 https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareCenter
@ Erich
Ok, that is a point. So is this planned one day to include this apt backend in App Center UI?
I feel this like a harmless consistency issue. But a non-geek beginner feels lost with two UI managing updates.
For non-geek beginners, it should just pop-up by itself periodically. Most (certainly not my 75+ year-old parents which are switching soon) aren’t going to care about running it manually at all.
Furtheremore, there’s a component you don’t see: unattended-upgrades, which also runs periodically to update certain items automatically, including snaps (correction, it only handles debs).
So, for beginners, this is a non-issue. Don’t overthink these things. 
I don’t know, but I would speculate no. Why do that when update-manager’s code works quite well? If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.
You can always browse around for that answer at GitHub - ubuntu/app-center: App Store for Ubuntu made with Flutter 🧡 💙.
Snaps actually do not need any external tool, they have a built-in mechanism to update themselves (the fact that you could not disable this initially was very controversial in the peanut gallery 
), unattended-upgrades should only handle debs …
Oh, that would be my mistake then. 
