A new blog post on the Linux Mint website reveals a new update notification system that lands in the distro. Earlier, developers pointed out that a lot of Mint users use outdated packages and even no longer supported releases of the distro.
The blog reveals that the Mint team did a research and figured out that many causal users recognize the importance of applying the updates, but since the OS doesn't require them, they used to omit the update installation. There is just a tiny icon that appears in the system tray when updates are available that you can simply forget to click, or even hide it.
They also claim that while many do not review each and every update, the fully automated updates (read forced updates) is not what they would like to have in the OS.
Fortunately, Mint is not going to follow Windows and Mac for the update installation. For instance, Windows 10 makes it harder to disable updates, only allows pausing them. Mint will retain control in the user's hands but will notify when updates are available.
We designed a notification system which acts as a gentle and welcome reminder and took great care not to turn it into an annoyance.
Here's how the notification looks.
It will appear in addition to the system tray icon and will attract users' attention. When a notification is dismissed it is snoozed for 2 days. The notification system is configurable and can be completely disabled.
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.
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).
By default the Update Manager also only counts security and kernel updates as being relevant for notifications but you can change that.
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