SUMMARY If I launch discover from the system tray and it starts to fetch updates, there is no button at the top-right to stop that fetching of updates and the 'Esc' key does not stop them either. STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Launch discovert by clicking the system tray icon. 2. While it is fetching updates, press 'Esc'. OBSERVED RESULT Should abort what it was doing (fetching updates). EXPECTED RESULT Continues what it was doing. SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Operating System: Debian GNU/Linux KDE Plasma Version: 5.23.0 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.86.0 Qt Version: 5.15.2 Kernel Version: 5.14.0-3-amd64 (64-bit) Graphics Platform: X11 Processors: 16 × AMD Ryzen 7 2700 Eight-Core Processor Memory: 15.5 GiB of RAM Graphics Processor: AMD VEGA10 ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
It has to fetch updates to be able to install them. There isn't a use case for canceling this on the updates page, because if you could do so, then you wouldn't be able to actually install updates, which is the only purpose of being on the Updates page.
(In reply to Nate Graham from comment #1) > It has to fetch updates to be able to install them. There isn't a use case > for canceling this on the updates page, because if you could do so, then you > wouldn't be able to actually install updates, which is the only purpose of > being on the Updates page. That’s not quite right: it’s possible to have updates available that were already fetched before and which are currently installable without fetching additional updates (e.g. if they were fetched 1hr ago, there’s a high chance that they won’t change much). What’s more, it fetches updates from different sources and some take longer to fetch than others. It does make sense to want to cancel updates fetching if one wants to quickly upgrade a package that one already knows is available to upgrade, and in my case this issue leads me quite often to switch to aptitude or synaptic instead of using discover.
Discover doesn't let you update only previously-fetched updates because the underlying package management systems it uses don't all support this. It has to refresh so than when you click "Update" it does everything. I think the real issue you are trying to report is that checking for updates takes too long. That's a legitimate issue. But it's something we should fix, not add knobs for the user to be able to work around it. If it took two seconds, I bet you wouldn't mind so much and wouldn't go hunting around for workarounds. :)