I think you all have figured it out.
Good job!
It’s a settings choice by the developers. Not a bug.
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As this is the Support and Help category, solving the asked question is where this topic should reasonably end.
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Folks who want to have a technical discussion with developers about use cases and design should open a new topic in the Project Discussion category.
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If anyone wants to write a HOWTO for future users, the Lounge’s Tips & Tricks category is a great place to post it.
EDIT: I was wrong. It’s indeed a bug.
Thanks to the folks who filed a bug report and got it fixed!
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It’s probably worse than that. If users choose to not use unattended-upgrades to automatically download and install updates and don’t enable the tray icon, no notification will ever be presented for regular updates, security updates, or new releases by update-manager Edit: unless manually run by the user. When running update-manager from the command-line or “/usr/lib/update-notifier/backend_helper.py show_updates” update-manager will launch and show updates. It’s the auto-launching ability that was stripped.
The reason for this is not a problem with update-manager, but rather with update-notifier. Code in update-notifier was stripped out that calls /usr/lib/update-notifier/backend_helper.py to auto-launch update-manager when it detects that updates are available.
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Hi!
This is a follow-up to https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/update-manager-never-popping-up/85064 (which happened to be mistitled after a bit of investigation).
From what we gathered:
update-notifier monitors a bunch of apt files to see if apt operations have been performed.
When some have, it uses /usr/lib/update-notifier/apt-check to get the number of regular and security updates.
If this number is higher than the last time he checked (or 0;0 at startup) then update-notifier takes action :
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it displays a tray icon if com.ubuntu.update-notifier show-updates-status-icon is true
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it sends a notification based on com.ubuntu.update-notifier regular-auto-launch-interval and com.ubuntu.update-manager launch-time AND if the tray icon is displayed
This means that no notification is ever sent if com.ubuntu.update-notifier show-updates-status-icon is false, which is default in 26.04.
Conversely, a user who wants to be periodically notified of standard updates (e.g. every 7 days) has no way to to do it without enabling a tray icon showing immediately when updates are available.
This also means that users opting out of unattended-upgrades will never be notified of any update of any kind, security included.
This looks like an issue to me, at least one for “standard” users.
I had declared a bug against update-manager but moved it to update-notifier:
As stated in a related bug report, this was a design choice:
Perhaps this is the place to have that discussion, @3v1n0? I think, the major sticking point is that it’s hard to opt-in, because, as far as we know, there is no other way than resorting to gsettings; not exactly what Ubuntu users have come to expect.