Feature request: service that notifies users if new deployment is available

[ledif]

From Discord user engin: https://discord.com/channels/1072614816579063828/1226572714668724286/1348267279401619496

This could be a systemd service that periodically checks the status of rpm-ostree upgrade --check and lets the user know once per new deployment that a new upgrade is available. This service should be disabled by default but can be enabled either via ujust or through the Aurora Preferences GUI.

[enginkarakurt]

Hey there, I'm the one from discord. What would be nice aswell is notifying when an update has started downloading/processing!

[p5]

Just to add some context - not disagreeing the idea or anything, but just explaining the previous logic:

The idea in Bluefin was to not have such a service because updates are very frequent (daily or more frequent), and some users could get annoyed thinking "ugh, another update. Time to reboot... Again...".
In Bluefin, the updates are supposed to be invisible, where they are applied without the user thinking about it. Just shutdown the computer daily/weekly and forget about ever updating again.

Something that's opt-in might be good for the other group of people who do want to know exactly when a new update is available.

[enginkarakurt]

@p5 I totally agree with that! Should just be a opt-in setting, maybe in the Aurora Preferences menu!

[GarciaLnk]

I think ideally the user should receive a (single) notification whenever it has passed X amount of time, and they haven't updated their system yet. This could be a good compromise that allows us to inform our users to update from time to time, without being too annoying.

And to comment further on the topic, I strongly disagree with the argument that system updates should be invisible. IMO, they should always be visible, otherwise when a user experiences a new bug they can't easily know if it's caused by an upstream regression or by another external factor. Right now, that information is never communicated to the user. Showing a brief message whenever the user reboots their system (either at log-out or log-in) and a new deployment is applied would be enough. This could be similar to the notifications we already send when some scripts run at startup after being updated.