Something new? "Refresh" of system components

[asqwerth]

I was surprised Discover was chosen over Synaptic for the official KDE release, since Synaptic affords more power under the hood, like freezing packages. But the interface is snazzy and I grew used to it. But this latest problem was too much.

There are a few things I prefer from xfce over kde, one being the console, which I have retained. Otherwise I have never looked back from KDE.

The intention in MX KDE is to try to prefer KDE-native, or at the very least, Qt, apps over gtk toolkit apps as much as possible.

But mixing toolkits has never bothered me. I want to use programs that I think are better or more fitted to my use case. So even in MX KDE I will install Gparted, Meld, Geany, Synaptic.

Gparted - because I have had issues with KDE partition manager before when I used it. My impression is that it's not as safe and stable as Gparted.

Meld - because I never could get used to Kdiff3.

Geany - Kate actually wrongly adds hard Returns out of nowhere in some lines when you open a conky config file. So some single lines get split into 2. I've messed up so many of my conkies, and then wondered why they didn't work anymore, just because I'd opened/edited them in Kate while using my KDE plasma distros. Now, I use Kate editor only to edit root files because of its easy elevation of privileges.

Synaptic over Discover, duh! I open up Discover only once in a rare while to check on what KDE store elements have updates. Doesn't mean I actually install the updates though.

Previously I also avoided Ark as the archive manager as there were times it didn't properly extract archives into my selected file location. I went with Arqiver instead, which Stevo introduced in MX19 KDE, I think. However, the version of Ark in MX23 seems ok.

[paul1149]

All has been quiet since I disabled the flatpak repos in Discover - until today. But now I am confronted with two "Refresh" entries, which sure enough traced back to flathub.

2024-12-21_02(2).png

So I checked my Discover settings to see if something had changed, but no, the repos were still disabled:

2024-12-21_02.png

I then tried to delete the repos altogether, and was confronted with an elevation confirm dialog even though I had just elevated Discover to perform wanted updates. Ok, it's a higher level function. But after confirming, Discover said it cannot remove the repos.

It seems Discover wants to foist these refreshes on me very badly.

So I installed trusty Synaptic. (Boy does that thing need a dark skin.) No refreshes were offered. It did pick up the availability of Thunderbird 1.128, which for some reason Discover does not report.

I'm not sure how to proceed from here. I think I want to nuke Discover, and I would like to have an automatic daily check for updates. I guess I can create a autorun rule for Synaptic. Is that the best way to get regular updates?

Thanks.

[j2mcgreg]

MXPI is installed in KDE, so you might give it a try and see which one you like better before you remove Discover.

[paul1149]

Discover is definitely going to go, or at least be taken out of autoruns and not be called on. MXPI will do the job, with some clicks. I don't suppose there's a command line to point to the Enabled Repos tab and the Upgradable filter. Or I may use Synaptic with an Upgradable custom filter.

[asqwerth]

Install apt-notifier.

That's the mx updater for mx xfce

[paul1149]

Thanks. That's the one I was looking for. But there doesn't seem to be a way to do selective updates through it. I got a nice pop-up menu a few times, offering to update via Synaptic, etc, but I have no idea how it got there, it's not from the mx-notifier tray icon, and clicking on its Synaptic entry did nothing. As it stands I think I'll be using Synaptic, because it gives me granularity and it opens directly on an updated list of Upgradable packages.

Ok, with mx-notifier closed, that pop-up menu is from right-clicking its tray icon.