SUMMARY I updated my system to Fedora 37 last night. This morning I see the "Updates Available" icon on my dash. I click on it, and Discover starts up, puts up a "Fetching updates..." message and a progress bar, and then proceeds to take several minutes to load the list of updates. It would be nice if it could download the list of updates *before* trying to gain my attention. This irritation is further compounded by the fact that the progress bar travels fast until it reaches about 95%, and then appears to hang (although I'm sure it'll finish... eventually). And under the hood, the icing on the cake is that the list of updates being downloaded is likely 99% similar to the list it had from the day before, and yet it's downloading the whole thing again. If it could be changed to download and apply a patch to the list of updates, that would speed things up. If you could do a DNS lookup of a TXT record (e.g. update-status.kde.org) that returned a signed serial number and date, then the client wouldn't even have to connect to the repository to discover that nothing's changed since the last time they checked. If the signature is bad or the date is old, fall back to checking the repository. STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Install Fedora (or maybe just KDE) 2. Wait for the "Updates available" icon to appear (hours? days?) 3. Click on the icon OBSERVED RESULT "Hurry up and wait" EXPECTED RESULT "Skinner Box" SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Windows: macOS: Linux/KDE Plasma: Fedora Linux 37 - Kernel 6.1.12-200.fc37.x86_64 (64-bit) (available in About System) KDE Plasma Version: 5.27.0 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.103.0 Qt Version: 5.15.8 ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Would you be able to tell us if it still happens with "plasma-discover --backends packagekit-backend --mode update"? If it does, can you check the packagekit-backend part by the other backends as listed in "plasma-discover --listbackends"? I'm not sure it's updates download that is being slow, it needs to have updated already for us to know that there's updates available at all.
It doesn't take 5 minutes for me, but I've also found it a slight annoyance that I need to wait for it to fetch updates after the system has told me that updates are available. I've _just_ updated my packages in case that matters, but here are my timings: Clicking the "updates are available" icon in the systray: 7 seconds to fetch updates. packagekit-backend: Less than one second, almost immediate on the second attempt. fwupd-backend: Immediate. kns-backend: 7 seconds, the terminal is spammed with "log_attica_plugin: We got an OpenDesktop account, but it seems to be lacking the id token. This means an old SignOn OAuth2 plugin was used for logging in. The plugin may have been upgraded in the meantime, but an account created using the old plugin cannot be used, and you must log out and back in again." while it is updating. flatpak-backend: Immediate.
That's a valuable observation. I can reproduce the issue of the KNS backend being slow AF.
Is it possible to disable the kns-backend? As far as I can tell, it provides "application addons" and "plasma addons", not sure if I have installed anything from there, but I don't think so. It doesn't seem possible to check installed software per source, would be nice if I could click "Installed" and then "Application Addons" in the sidebar to filter, but when I do this it goes to browse available apps instead. Maybe there's something I could put in .config/discoverrc but I haven't found any documentation for available options
Yes, typically it's packaged separately, so you can just remove the package. We should make it faster, though.
Is there any way to list all apps installed from a specific backend? Manually browsing through installed apps in Discover I see that Arc Dark theme and some related packs are distributed by "KDE Store". This would be the KNS backend, right?
That's the KNS backend, yes. There's currently no way to sort installed content by backend or source.
This'll all be substantially improved in Plasma 6.2.0.