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Comment by ultrarunner | Hacker News Reader

We work at remote sites on cell connections. Part of the reason we moved to Ubuntu from Windows was the ability to control data usage, which is expensive. Automatic updates quickly become a significant slice of the bill when random decisions like these get pushed on users. Ubuntu was supposed to help prevent us from needing to chase this.

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Exactly. It seems like these days everyone assumes you are on a stable broadband connection. In many parts of the world getting a fast and stable internet connection is literally impossible.

Did you tick the metered connection box?

This is from the blog.

> Even on metered connections, snaps auto-update anyway after some time.

Windows lets you set your network connection as metered, and doing so prevents it from applying automatic updates.

I recently switched back to linux myself, but there are certain utilities and conveniences and options in Windows that linux distros don't yet provide, and ubuntu definitely is not meant to be light weight in any sense of the term. Is switching to something else an option at this point?

I think part of the problem is that many newish users equate Linux with Ubuntu, good and bad. There are many other options and Ubuntu should not be the default anymore.

You aren't wrong, but I hate to say it... there are a lot of things that Ubuntu got right, and generally speaking derivatives of Ubuntu almost always work without any extra fiddling or driver hunting for me.

An experienced user could probably find a nicely tuned arch / manjaro setup to work better for them than Ubuntu, but if someone is just first getting their toes wet and learning, Ubuntu isn't a bad recommendation for a first go-round.

I've tried several Linux distros, but always go back to Ubuntu as it tends to work with the least fuss. Still a lot of fuss compared to Windows and Mac for desktop software, but less for development, so it balances out. Ubuntu 20.04 is super snappy (catch the pun?) and really has been working well for me. I strongly recommend it. It feels like a new computer.

My experience is the exact opposite, I recently built a desktop, the motherboard is ASUS ROG STRIX Z390 GAMING, despite all my efforts, Ubuntu wasn't able to even boot, While Fedora not only booted, but was "super snappy"

I have a much, much better idea of what process is using network traffic or other resources on Linux than on Windows (I don't know how often tracing tools pointed fingers at the "system" process for weird magic like CPU or network usage). Unless you mean the 20.04 LTS thing specifically (it sounds like you had this issue for longer), it should be exceedingly easy to turn off anything that runs automatically.

pop_os should fit the bill. Based in ubuntu, with a better UI, and has flatpack support and added polish

FWIW, for this very reason, there is refresh.metered=hold, as I note in my comment earlier in the thread.

Will setting `refresh.metered=hold` prevent snap updates indefinitely?

Can I mark all my network connections as metered?

I'm not sure how refresh.metered behaves when there is a network device change, but I assume it will, yes.

And I'm pretty sure NM lets you set all network connections metered, i.e.

  nmcli connection modify $CONNECTION connection.metered yes

See https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/364927/networkmanag...

Someone on reddit stated that snapd will update snaps regardless of what value `refresh.metered` holds when updates are postponed long enough. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to verify whether this claim is true or false.

Canonical should be up front about this type of information.

Windows 10 has an out of the box feature to mark connections as metered which disables automatic updates.

On Ethernet which ultimately has a cellular uplink?

Yes, but this is something that needs to be set.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4028458/windows-met...

Yes, you can set it on any connection. It can also be set as a group policy.

> which disables automatic updates.

Except for the ones Microsoft thinks are really important to push to you.

Really? I spent a year with that on (satellite for awhile, then 4g lye data) and never saw an update automatically go through.

Based on the discussion linked in the article Ubuntu does as well.

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