Is it safe to remove / disable Discover?

[deanr]

I'm finding Discover's manner of updating quite tiresome - it's alerts me of an upgrade, I click on notification to open it, it then takes a while to compile the list of updates, I click update all, it then does nothing but sit there, finally it asks for my password, then it compiles the list again...

I'd much rather receive a simple notification and update via Konsole or Synaptic.

Is there a simple GUI way to remove/disable Discover but still receive update notifications?

Thanks.

[chimak111]

Even if you leave Discover installed, you can just ignore it and use the command line. That's what I do.

[jglen490]

Ditto, what chimak11 said. It's simple, and closes out the specific Discover notification, too.

[deanr]

Ah, maybe. I did try using Konsole but only after initially dealing with Discover's choke. This then leads to the 'Unable to acquire the dpkg etc., is another process using it?' message.

I guess the trick is to not go anywhere near Discover (I'll remove it from my dock) but skip straight to Konsole/Synaptic.

I'll give that a whirl next time then mark this as solved if all goes well. Thanks.

[Don B. Cilly]

Well, have you tried to simply disable notifications in the panel and just make an alias?

[chimak111]

Ah, maybe. I did try using Konsole but only after initially dealing with Discover's choke. This then leads to the 'Unable to acquire the dpkg etc., is another process using it?' message.

That's not uncommon. It happens if you try to update while an automatic APT process is already running. Just wait for some time and try again.

If you want to see what's going on, open top You'll see a variety of processes and after a while, you'll get to recognize what's what and when to run sudo apt update and sudo apt upgrade or, my preference, sudo apt full-upgrade without the Unable to … message popping up.

[CharlieDaves]

Yeah Me too. I have had it with this current daily or twice daily updates.

How does one 'Disable Update' or at least set it to less annoying once per week
I too enjoyed the previous version of cmd line doing an update when it suited ME !

Most of these updates appear petty

[claydoh]

Yeah Me too. I have had it with this current daily or twice daily updates.

How does one 'Disable Update' or at least set it to less annoying once per week
I too enjoyed the previous version of cmd line doing an update when it suited ME !

Most of these updates appear petty

Assuming you are on 18.04, you should not be getting bombarded with updates all that often, unless you have added a third party repo that updates constantly - one of the popular driver PPAs has them at least once a day by design, for example.

As an LTS release, you are getting security updates mostly, and the way Linux breaks things down into small components, you usually only need these tiny bits instead of the whole shebang - look at the file sizes every now and again and you will often see them in the Kb ranges. They are in no way petty.





You of course can disable notifications, and there are how-toooo's allover the net on disabling how often *bunut checks for them in the background - in the 'Sources' option in Discover, or use the search function in the Kmenu to look for 'software sources' you can adjust the interval.