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The KDE neon developers recently announced the availability of offline updates for their rolling-release GNU/Linux distribution and the end of support for the KDE neon Plasma LTS Edition.
Offline updates (à la Microsoft Windows) are becoming a thing among GNU/Linux distributions. Fedora Linux was among the first major OS to offer support for offline updates, and now KDE neon is jumping on the bandwagon, in an attempt to make the system update experience more reliable.
Offline updates are now rolling out to all KDE neon editions, including KDE neon User Edition, KDE neon Testing Edition, KDE neon Unstable Edition, as well as KDE neon Developer Edition, and are available only when updating your installation using KDE’s Plasma Discover graphical package manager.
As you can imagine, the offline update feature only downloads available updates and marks them for installations after rebooting the system, just like on the Windows operating system. One advantage of this functionality, according to the KDE neon devs, is that you won’t have to interrupt your workflow to update the system.
In Linux, everyone knows that applying updates is rebootless, except for kernel updates, and that’s still a thing in KDE neon if you update your installation from the command line or using a different graphical package manager, such as Synaptic Package Manager.
In some rare cases, the system may become unreliable during updates, so you can consider using offline updates if that has happened to you in the past. Also, offline update may attract more Windows users who want to switch to GNU/Linux.
“Previously you might have been angrily looked at by Firefox, had Dolphin crash on you, or even got locked out of the session because the lockscreen jumped off a cliff after you applied an update,” said the KDE neon devs. “Offline updates solve this problem.”
In related news, the KDE neon developers announced today that they plan to put an end to the KDE neon Plasma LTS edition starting July 1st, 2021, as it doesn’t offer a great user experience and it’s hard to maintain it now that it’s no longer popular.
If you want to use the LTS (Long-Term Support) series of the KDE Plasma desktop environment, the KDE neon developers recommend migrating to either Kubuntu LTS or openSUSE Leap before July 1st. But if you decided to stick with KDE neon, you will have to switch to the KDE neon User Edition, which ships with the latest stable KDE Plasma branch.
Update 17/04/21: The KDE neon devs added a new option in System Settings > Updates to let you turn off offline updates. This setting will be available in the KDE Plasma 5.22 desktop environment.
Last updated 3 years ago
