Hello everyone. Just installed Bluefin and so far liking it quite well. However as non-tech user the underlying jargon is all Greek & Latin to me, so hope this forum can help me get to grips with the system.
First up I do have unlimited net but bandwidth is not all that great, about 10 Mbps. I notice that Bluefin updates almost every day and downloads 1 to 1.5 GB with every update. Though I don’t care about the data it does saturate my link for about an hour or so, making it impossible to watch yt or streams. Also am a bit concerned my SSD life could be shortened a lot.
So I’m wondering what the actual issues would be if I update manually say every 4-5 days. Is it possible, and if so how? Would it mess up the system? So am assuming I’d have to disable the auto-update mechanism (how?) and then manually run when I’m ready for the update. Any help appreciated and thanks to everyone who made this lovely distro.
Hi and welcome! Here’s the doc on adjusting updates:
The biggest drawback is you won’t get security and kernel updates during that time, but you should still probably update your flatpaks regularly for things like your browser and other apps with a manual flatpak update command. The ujust update command will manually upgrade everything.
Being behind on updates won’t mess up your system, you’ll just be behind on updates.
Forgot to add, the data usage is relatively high for the base image, in order to fix that we need what are called “container diffs” so that it’s only downloading the changes.
The right people are aware and it’s something the industry needs but requires collaborating around the OCI spec. I am one of many actively working on “getting the right people in the room” to get this moving, but it’s not going to happen right away.
For the flatpak apps you’ll be getting efficient delta updates.
Hi, and thanks for all your efforts. Bluefin in certainly not a run-of-mill Linux distro & is blazing a different path.
I read that page a couple of days back and at the time the “ujust toggle-updates” portion wasn’t yet there. So if I’m getting it right, both “ujust toggle-updates” as well as the ‘systemctl disable/enable…’ commands at the bottom both accomplish the same thing but the systemctl ones are lower level? And in both cases both system updates as well as flatpak updates are turned on/off right? Is there a way to keep flatpak updates rolling in but just toggle base system updates off for a while?
Answering my own last post, if I’m not wrong, the “Manually (main images)” section of the linked post does exactly what I asked. Just keep the default timer for flatpak while editing rpm-ostree’s config to get it to just check instead of download…