Ubuntu 24.04.
Irritating notification:
Software Updates installed. Important operating system updates have been installed.
appears every time I turn on my computer.
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Ubuntu is worse than my W11 with updates!!!
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You are not alone in this difficulty, but the following ubuntu help response may guide you more
Can you not turn off the automatic updating.?
I always do mine manually. … it stops it doing updates at shutdown which can result in an annoying long wait to power off.
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I am sure you can turn it off.
Which distro are you using?
Disabling Automatic Updates:
Graphical Interface (Ubuntu/Debian):
Open the "Software & Updates" application (or update-manager from the terminal).
Go to the "Updates" tab.
Change the setting for "Automatically check for updates" to "Never".
Command Line (General):
Edit the configuration file for unattended-upgrades: sudo nano /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades.
Comment out the lines related to automatic upgrades (e.g., APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "1"; and APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade "1";).
Restart the unattended-upgrades service: sudo systemctl stop unattended-upgrades and then sudo systemctl disable unattended-upgrades.
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Updating is a more troublesome question than may appear, though lately my Win 11 machine delays shutdown less often than it used to when I see from my office window a thunderstorm rolling over the plain.
Some people update Linux manually, but this is not an option for most, and particularly for people who are not too familiar with computers. Mint is a frequent choice here, and trouble has been reported with version 22 sometimes failing to implement automatic updates.
Such apparently minor difficulties can’t be considered in isolation; they are too common and they can render a distro or even Linux unusable in many situations. LibreOffice might serve to illustrate: a few apparently minor bugs or design faults (which were documented a few years back and don’t seem accidental) may explain why this great software suite can be almost unusable in business and education applications.
I guess the new EU OS project will deal with these matters if it gets going. So far no mention of the need to have control of the BIOS.
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I am not sure the idea is to share that with all residents. If you check the web site it looks like just the police in france not wider scale. One standard for all government département is a great idea.
Most distros will be reliable if you leave the default install configuration alone and resist the temptation to fiddle.
When people start trying untested combinations of apps and settings they will find occasional gliches, but there is nearly always a workaround.
I dont see why business or education use should be particularly demanding. They just need stability and sensible work patterns.
When there are gliches, people are usually to blame, not the computer… it is always the same.
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I do, there have been reports of fatal bugs for many years, and the reply was often that nothing can be done because it’s built in to the odf format. I contributed, but gave up following the subject in detail a while ago, and haven’t seen a document that does a synthesis; this isn’t covered by a single thread.
However, not so long ago I paid the subscription for WPS Office, which is inexpensive for the first year. The first thing I did was to try some spreadsheet documents (quotations, invoices, etc.) I’d made in LO for a friend who was setting up a micro-business. Here, you absolutely need to lock formatting, formulae, page layout and so on, while allowing the user to input data. WPS came up with a huge pop-up advert to say that this can be done there, but not on the FOSS applications. Note that such selective locking is absolutely essential for some kinds of teaching material; incidentally, the French education system is tied to M$, including their “official” “teams” application (nowadays vital for many university students) for which their Linux implementation seems designed not to work.
Another major “show-stopper” I haven’t re-tried lately is that LO mixes up number, date and currency representations with the localisation (country, language) settings. This plays havoc any time you have to open or save anything that has or will cross a national boundary.
Most distros will be reliable if you leave the default install configuration alone
Linux Mint 22 defaults to manual updating which, as I have already explained, is not an option for many users. As far as I’m aware, it’s unsafe to disable updating of any OS that’s going to be used on the web. We could advise adjusting the settings, but as others have remarked, they don’t seem to work reliably: you still get the orange warning dot. Those of us who recycle computers on the free circuit try to standardise and can’t go distro-hopping. I think this aspect of Mint, critical for many of us, needs a specific settings window, with clear explanations and no fussy tabs. But providing well-drafted feedback takes time I don’t have.
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If LO and WPS have this deficiency, it amazes me that fixing it does not have some priority.
Workarounds like running Win in an emulator or VM are too messy.
I dont get why an update notification is an irritation?
Have you tried turning off notifications?
The biggest problem I see in business and education is the lack of people who understand how to maintain an operating system. They have to have “works out of the box” solutions. Updates to them means throw the hardware and software away, and start with a new “works out of the box” solution.
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My point is that not only does WPS not have the design fault, the fact that this is used for advertising purposes provides convincing evidence that the fault is critical in the sense that it’s one of the few that prevent the widespread adoption of an otherwise excellent software suite.
We - and the EU OS project - must not be naive about things we don’t like to talk about, such as who can join the development team for a major FOSS project.
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Sorry, I completely misunderstood that part.
I have only ever used WPS Office on Android. … it did what I wanted there.
You seem to be suggesting that the LO development team are ignoring an important problem.
Are you sure? Have you tried documenting it and posting a fault report? Do they acknowledge the existence of a problem?
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Yep:
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Well done.
All we need now is infinite patience.
I was not aware until a few years ago that people used spreadsheets for data entry.
Years ago that would have been thought an overkill. One would have used the simplest tool available… eg an editor or even some offline device.
Things have changed. I am not sure what accepted practice is now. Can I ask how you verify the data entered into a spreadsheet?
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That’s part of a history - which must have been written somewhere - that goes back thousands of years. Tedious calculations, often repetitive, drove people mad for that long, in commerce, accountancy, astronomy, surveying, commerce, etc. Ever since Legendre invented least squares in 1805 for estimating overdetermined results (Gauss claimed priority) people have tried to avoid having to do the procedure.
I have a book of 7-figure logs from 1795 (1851 printing). Every schoolkid used to have 4-figure tables.
During the 1960s we had a specially bent needle to unseize the laboratory mechanical calculator. We could go to the university computer centre, but as every job was different it was necessary change some of the punched cards used for input, and wait a day or two for the printout. Computer time was rationed.
Simple lists that function as databases were done on notched cards managed manually. We used them for spectroscopic databases.
https://hackaday.com/2019/06/18/before-computers-notched-card-databases/
Modern spreadsheets have enough database-like functionality for many purposes.
In my research industry job (pharma), computing was (and still is probably) the ferociously guarded dominion of the IT department. Since they took two years to decide whether to take on a job, they effectively determined much of research policy. Some instrument suppliers would agree to sneak an undeclared 8-bit machine into big orders.
When dedicated office machines came in (late 1970s), the office suite had a built-in spreadsheet and the IT lords couldn’t stop anyone using it. This was a huge revolution in every sector, even though jokes soon spread about know-it-all bosses crashing the company. Numerical instability due to short word length (nothing to do with the compuer word length) was a risk for the unwary until about the year 2000, particularly with statistics.
Though spreadsheets have always been used for making and sorting simple lists, macro-programming allows people to go much further. Once old-time coders had got used to object-oriented code, VBA was easy to learn from a book you could buy with the groceries. As soon as we had the internet, advice and code snippets became easy to obtain. In our regulated sector, we used it to make spreadsheet printouts done with a mix of VBA and formulae look to an inspector as though the calculations had been done with a pocket calculator (which was allowed!). We did have scientific colleagues who knew about validation.
Having said all that, I think the important point to be made is that the VBA ecosystem is likely to be a serious obstacle to LibreOffice or other FOSS application becoming a major actor. To illustrate, not long ago I needed to make some flashcards for teaching English in France; whereas a search for VBA flashcards produced hundred of hits, there was next to nothing for LibreOffice, though it supports 4 macro languages.
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The history of lotus 123 was
1 spreadsheet
2 drawing graphs
3 database
Yes I started a long time back with lotus 1 when it first launched in the uk…
Never heard of VBA… had to look it up… Visual Basic…
never tried it.
Spreadsheets never really took off in scientific computing . Not good for huge datasets or for complicated arithmetic. People use R dataframes rather than spreadsheets.
What really made a hit was PowerPoint… presentations are a big thing in research.
There is a FOSS spreadsheet called gnumeric.
I have used it to convert data from excel format to csv. It does not support visual basic. There are plugins that allow Python, and there is a move to integrate it with R.
At the R end there is a package which will access gnumeric files.
Here is the experimental R plugin for gnumeric
Both Python and R are superior to Visual Basic for any type of calculations.
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That’s not why Microsoft integrated VBA in excel. They wanted to be incompatible with the rest of the world – seeing they had a monopoly.
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This thread started with another subject, but it turned to the need to break a monopoly that will in the end stymie future evolution of the product concerned. A major European driving force is the need to resist Microsoft’s absence of respect for privacy (particularly when setting up protected accounts for minors), but there are other worrying indicators including their penchant for inventing ways of seriously annoying their users.
My point about VBA is that it is in such widespread use that what is in effect the VBA-Excel monopoly has become a major obstable to the development of any alternative office suite.
As I tried to explain earlier, ordinary spreadsheets - including LibreOffice Calc - are exceedingly powerful, even in the hands of people who don’t know coding and may not even be computer-literate. For more elaborate requirements, VBA had a synergistic effect, to the extent that, despite its very easy learning curve, it led to the creation of a huge number of consultancy and service companies that are based on VBA-Excel. Twenty-odd years ago, when I had to do an urgent development that could not be sub-contracted, I found that the websites of many of these companies provided not only free advice, but numerous examples (code snippets) designed to be easily adaptable. Nowadays there seem to be even more websites, but fewer snippets on their menus.
Perhaps, after so many years, regulators and legislators might be able to convince Microsoft to relinquish any remaining copyright and intellectual property ownerships. This would allow the spreadsheet - macro language combination to evolve freely and be ported to Linux, while remaining backwards compatible. It could be argued that some agreement or enforcement is necessary because there seems to be no room, outside of niche usages, for more that one office suite and we can’t allow such an extreme monopoly to persist.
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I get the point.
Even though there are technically superior alternatives that are free, Microsoft users still opt to pay for an inferior and closed source product.
I dont know how you break that behaviour.?
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