I have an old Mac Mini (Late 2009 model) kicking around, and as Apple stopped providing patches for it (and as I'm not going to put an unpatched system on the Internet), I was looking for a Linux distribution to let it do basic tasks (mainly watching Netflix, Youtube, and maybe a bit of LibreOffice usage). I ended up installing Lubuntu 20.04 on it several months ago. For the most part it does what I want, but there's a real big annoyance: Whenever there are updates to apply, it displays a box over whatever the system's doing asking if updates should be applied.

Now, as a general concept it makes sense to want to ask about updates (I mean, like I said the reason I went down this road was because I wanted a system that got current security updates), but it asks regardless of who is logged into the system. That is, while I of course have an admin account on the system that has sudo rights, usually the computer is being used by one of the kids (who each have their own login), and it just gets in the way of what they are trying to do. It seems really weird to me that it prompts for updates, especially when the user it's prompting can't actually do anything about it.

Is there some way to:

1. Suppress the dialog box asking for updates from non-admin accounts?
2. Automatically install updates rather than just prompting to do so? (I guess I'm really looking for the Windows-style model here, where it just updates and reboots itself overnight when nobody is logged in and you don't even really notice.)
3. Or, preferably both?

posted over 3 years ago

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Peter Cooper Jr.‭

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