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Matthias Klumpp: Update notifications in Debian Jessie Published Sep 7 2015 via RSS

planetUbuntu

Piwik told me that people are still sharing my post about the state of GNOME-Software and update notifications in Debian Jessie.

So I thought it might be useful to publish a small update on that matter:

• If you are using GNOME or KDE Plasma with Debian 8 (Jessie), everything is fine – you will receive update notifications through the GNOME-Shell/via g-s-d or Apper respectively. You can perform updates on GNOME with GNOME-PackageKit and with Apper on KDE Plasma.
• If you are using a desktop-environment not supporting PackageKit directly – for example Xfce, which previously relied on external tools – you might want to try pk-update-icon from jessie-backports. The small GTK+ tool will notify about updates and install them via GNOME-PackageKit, basically doing what GNOME-PackageKit did by itself before the functionality was moved into GNOME-Software.
• For Debian Stretch, the upcoming release of Debian, we will have gnome-software ready and fully working. However, one of the design decisions of upstream is to only allow offline-updates (= download updates in the background, install on request at next reboot) with GNOME-Software. In case you don’t want to use that, GNOME-PackageKit will still be available, and so are of course all the CLI tools.
• For KDE Plasma 5 on Debian 9 (Stretch), a nice AppStream based software management solution with a user-friendly updater is also planned and being developed upstream. More information on that will come when there’s something ready to show ;-).

I hope that clarifies things a little. Have fun using Debian 8!