When you open the Update Notifier Plasmoid, it says, "n packages to update". It seems to already have a list of updates. But then when you click the "View Updates" button to open Discover, Discover has to fetch those updates all over again, which can take several seconds during which time the UI is showing the wrong thing. It would be nice if Discover could always have the list of updates already available on launch because they've been pre-fetched by the notifier plasmoid.
We don't get notified when new updates happen. We already keep refreshing every 24h but otherwise there's not much else we can do. Actually on apt/neon we check "apt-config dump" for Apt::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists value.
So the notifier and the app pull from different data sources?
No, they pull the same. The fact that it's already pulled though doesn't mean that it's up to date. Re-pulling, even if it's with almost correct data is slow with apt.
It refreshes the cache if the cache is older than 1h. You can see the time your cache has with this command: pkcon get-time refresh-cache We could extend it to be more than 1h but I don't think this should make a huge difference.
*** Bug 403348 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
This continues to feel weird, and we just got another bug report from a user. I think we should reconsider and see if we can improve the situation here.
I've been thinking about this recently and if a purely technical solution isn't apparent (and it doesn't seem to be), perhaps a workflow solution would do the trick. So instead of: 1. Single left click on Update icon that drops down to show number of updates and an update button. 2. Discover opens with a message of "Checking for updates...". we might have something like this: 1. Single left click on Update icon which immediately loads Discover (on hover says "Updates Available" or similar). 2. Discover opens with a message of "Getting full list of updates..." I feel this would be better as it doesn't set any expectations that X amount of downloads are available & gives the impression that the Updater/Discover has only just appeared so it being in the process of getting all the updates seems normal. Though in some ways imprecise I believe this is how things are still done on Windows & people aren't unhappy about it there.
That's a pretty nice idea. It would also remove a step from the current workflow.
In fact, that's just what we ended up doing. :)