How to disable “offline updates” in Discover

As I told you the other day, KDE neon has implemented the «offline updates»… And they are a real nuisance. But they can be disabled very easily, so let’s get to it …

… but not before warning that “offline updates”, “offline updates”, “offline updates“Or whatever you want to call it, it is not a KDE neon fad, but rather a standard feature proposed by freedesktop.org (the organization that” works for interoperability and sharing of the core technology of desktop environments ” Linux) that have already implemented GNOME-based distributions such as Fedora, in order to make the process more stable and secure.

So, keep in mind that if you disable offline updates, you do so at your own risk and expense and against the decision of the distribution developers, in this case KDE neon, but also – if you get to this post in a while – of any other that adopts this procedure, which could potentially all be based on the KDE desktop environment and tools.

Personally, I have been updating the strip for years normally and the few times I have had a problem, I have solved it quickly by rebooting by hand and, at most, completing the update by console. And it could continue to do so since offline updates have only been rolled out for the moment in Discover, the KDE application store, and not in the terminal package manager.

In fact, this is how I have always updated the system on Linux, by terminal. I believe that there is no more reliable and complete way to do it -for the amount of information it includes- and KDE neon is no exception. But I have to admit, as critical as I have been to Discover, that the app has made a world of difference in the last couple of years and I’ve gotten used to just clicking it, entering my password, and letting it go.

What I don’t see myself getting used to is the tedious double reboot that offline updates have brought with them and that I talk about more in the first link of the article. As an example, the other day KDE neon updated the latest version of KDE Frameworks and I had to watch the boot screen with the update process for five minutes. Thanks but no. I can continue working for those five minutes and if I run into a problem, I’ll be fine.

But enough of rolls. How do I disable offline updates in Discover?

Edit the file (requires permissions):

/etc/xdg/discoverrc

And change the preference:

UseOfflineUpdates=true

De «true» a «false».

Save the file and if you had Discover open, close it for the changes to take effect. And remember: it never hurts to reboot after receiving a system update that updates important files… but with a spare time.