Last month we announced problems were found in relation to UsrMerge. In particular, packages built in merged systems were not always fully compatible with non-merged systems. A complete scan was done in Linux Mint to identify any other similar issue and a tool was developed to automate this process. In addition, a system report will be backported to recommend a merge to Mint 20 and 20.1 users whose system is not merged yet.<\/p>\n
Updates notifications Statistics recently showed us that many users did not update their computer. The way other operating systems handle updates is either by forcing their users to do so, or by frustrating them and annoying them until they do.<\/p>\n We spent time looking into this and talking to casual users to understand why they weren’t applying updates. We found many of them were sensitive to the importance of applying updates but didn’t do so simply because they were never really told to. When asked why and when they updated their phone they recognized that the phone update notifications were annoying but that they were successful in making them apply the updates.<\/p>\n Some users expressed a feeling of relief after applying phone updates, both because they felt like they were doing “the right thing” and because they knew the notification wouldn’t come back “for a while”. To us this looks like a partial delegation of responsibility. The user is aware of the importance of the issue and happy to be reminded of it to some extent as long as it doesn’t happen too often. Although the user does not review updates and is likely to apply all of them, he\/she is not fully onboard with automation, appreciates being asked consent and decides on the timing of the updates.<\/p>\n Statistics showed us we needed to do something. Feedback showed us people hated to be annoyed, taken hostage or forced to do something they didn’t want (this is a major source of frustration for Mac and Windows users apparently). We also had key principles to respect. This is your computer not ours. You’re also all very different and you use the software we make in very different ways, so we needed to keep that in mind and let you configure and tune the software so it remains flexible and useful no matter how you like to use it.<\/p>\n So with all that said here’s what we did. We designed a notification system which acts as a gentle and welcome reminder and took great care not to turn it into an annoyance.<\/p>\n For the notification to be welcomed and welcomed again it needs to happen for a reason, to be easy to dismiss if the user is busy, to not come back constantly and to not come back at all for a long while after the user applies the updates. When a notification is dismissed it is snoozed for 2 days. When updates are applied it goes away for a long time. The conditions for the notification to be shown in the first place are configurable.<\/p>\n When it comes to default settings we have casual users in mind, and in particular users who are the least likely to modify the settings. We want the OS the work as best as possible out of the box for them, and be flexible enough to be configured and tuned by more experienced users.<\/p>\n By default the Update Manager shows a notification if a particular update has been available for more than 7 logged-in days or if it’s older than 15 calendar days. These values can be configured all the way down to 2 days (for people who want more notifications) or all the way up to 90 days (for people who want less).<\/p>\n By default the Update Manager also only counts security and kernel updates as being relevant for notifications but you can change that.<\/p>\n The last setting is a grace period. If any update has been applied on your computer in the last 30 days, whether it’s via the Update Manager or via another APT software, no notifications will be shown.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When set to 90 these settings basically mean no notification would be shown for more than 3 months of the computer being outdated. If the goal is to never apply any updates (and there are valid reasons for that in some cases and some environments, test VMs for instance), the solution is simply to disable automatic checks or to even disable the Update Manager itself. If for some reason the use case was to be able to see available updates for more than 3 months but never to apply any of them, then in this case we’d recommend the use of a gsettings key we added for that specific purpose: com.linuxmint.updates tracker-disable-notifications.<\/p>\n We hope the default settings will work well for most people and these notifications will be a useful positive experience. The configuration made available is very flexible and should be able to please everybody.<\/p>\n Sponsorships:<\/strong><\/p>\n Linux Mint is proudly sponsored by:<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.linuxmint.com\/tmp\/blog\/4049\/notification.png\")
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