So Firefox freaked out so violently at some kind of… security thing on a web site that it flooded the desktop with events that the laptop was unusable.
Cool cool
So I rebooted, and:
OH MY GOD! First of all, that screen is so dusty! Second of all… when rebooting, Debian now kicks in something called “packagekit”!? And it… basically does an apt upgrade; apt install… WHEN REBOOTING!?
So I have to sit here waiting — for twenty minutes — while it’s downloading packages and installing them?
Finally Linux has reached parity with Microsoft Windows and Macos: Instead of running the updates in the background, like Linux has been doing for decades, it’s now requiring users to sit and stare at it while it’s upgrading.
Not only that, it’s doing this at the absolute worst time possible — when you’re rebooting. The only reason you’re rebooting is because something bad happened, and that’s not when you want to upgrade your fucking OS! You want to get back to what you were doing!
It’s mind boggling. Who came up with this idea?
Anyway, the solution seems to be to say:
apt remove packagekit
Even though it’s saying:
That sounds serious! But apparently it isn’t? At least the laptop seems to work fine after removing those.
Remember to remove packagegit whenever you install Debian these days.
Cherry on the cake: It updated some kind of firmware so that my 5G modem no longer works. Thanks!
[Edit: Later this day.]
I was wondering whether this was a misconfiguration on my laptop or something… But I had to reboot a display machine just now, and:
Yup. 15 minutes of updating. And that’s a machine that should never, ever require any updates, and the hardware is kinda weird, so I was going “eek”, but it came back up again after the update.
Hi, I am on Ubuntu 24.04 and running what you proposed, triggers the message
gstreamer1.0-packagekit* packagekit* packagekit-tools* software-properties-common* software-properties-gtk* ubuntu-desktop*
ubuntu-desktop-minimal* ubuntu-gnome-desktop*
which sort of scares me, any comments?
regards
Yeah, that sounds even more scary than on Debian. I’m not sure I would try it… sudo systemctl disable packagekit should in theory be sufficient to make it stop its nonsense, but some googling seems to show that it’s re-enabled automatically if you try to do that. Grrr.
Sometimes packages with scarily basic names aren’t, though. For instance, gnome-core, which was removed when I removed packagekit, sounds like a very serious thing, but it’s just something that has the copyright notice: