So, having a caveat about disabling automatic updates is probably a good thing, however, sometimes those recommendations can come off as condescending when what you probably want to do is remind people that if they disable automatic updates they should have a plan to upgrade periodically to take advantage of security updates etc. There is a reason why IT departments tend to establish plans for when to do updates critical or otherwise and its for all the reasons they are familiar with and that Ubuntu/Microsoft/OSX/whatever-devs aren’t. But depending on the complexity of your server setup and the dependencies in place its not always wise to assume that an update/upgrade should be done just because it is available. What do you think?Ībhishek, I appreciate the information you provided here and the general wisdom of keeping things up to date and the general attempts systems are making to be “evergreen” and up-to-date. A couple of minor annoyances are not really worth risking the security of your system. The automatic security updates are enabled automatically for a reason and I recommend you keep it like this. If you want it to check for updates but don’t install the unattended-upgrades automatically, you can choose to set it like this: APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists '1'

Now, if you don’t want your system to check for updates automatically, you can change the value of APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists to 0. The default text editor in Ubuntu terminal is Nano so you can use this command to edit this configuration file: sudo nano /etc/apt//20auto-upgrades You’ll find the auto-upgrades settings in the /etc/apt//20auto-upgrades file. How to disable automatic updates in Ubuntu using command line I believe this is a better solution, don’t you you think?Īs I promised both GUI and command line methods, let me show you how to disable unattended upgrades in the terminal. With this setup, you won’t see the “unattended upgrades in progress” when you shutdown your system However, you may still encounter the ‘could not get lock’ error because two separate processes cannot use apt package manager at the same time.

Update and shutdown not updating