Integrated update mechanism vs. OS’s update mechanism?

Users and developers helping users with generic and technical Pale Moon issues on all operating systems.

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yellowfinch
Moonbather
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Joined: 2017-01-09, 17:05

Integrated update mechanism vs. OS’s update mechanism?

Unread post by yellowfinch » 2020-10-18, 18:13

Just curious...

When Pale Moon is running on Linux Mint (and I’m sure I’ve read that it’s the same in Ubuntu and probably many other distros), updates are handled externally from Pale Moon, so the “Preferences | Advanced | Update” tab simply does not contain a “Pale Moon updates” section.

In Puppy Linux, it does.

What is it that triggers this difference?

I discovered this when, after Puppy Linux had been running for about 30 minutes, I got a popup offering me to update Pale Moon to a more recent version than the pre-installed 28.4.0. (It was offering 28.14.2, i.e. the most recent as of today. And I didn't even have to set up a PPA!)

I ran the Panopticlick test and saw that the platform is correctly detected as “Linux x86_64”.

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Pentium4User
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Re: Integrated update mechanism vs. OS’s update mechanism?

Unread post by Pentium4User » 2020-10-18, 18:32

The PM variant that is offered via the repository updates are manages by you operating system's update manager (in Ubuntu and MInt this is apt). If you download the tarball, the updates are controlled by PM's internal updater and completely independent of you package manager.

To ensure that PM is up to date ensure that your package manager is working and the repository is enabled.
Show the output of

Code: Select all

sudo apt update
, so w can check this.

The OS detection is mostly done by checking the User Agent that your browser sends.
If you don't manipulate it, it will send that it is a Linux machine. x86_64 means that it is the x86 architecture expanded to 64 bit (often called amd64, EM64T or Intel-64)
The profile picture shows my Maico EC30 E ceiling fan.

yellowfinch
Moonbather
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Joined: 2017-01-09, 17:05

Re: Integrated update mechanism vs. OS’s update mechanism?

Unread post by yellowfinch » 2020-10-18, 18:44

Thanks for the explanation.

I had forgotten that in Puppy Linux, by default, nothing is actually "installed". Not surprising, then, that they chose Pale Moon as the default browser. It's a perfect fit.

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stevenpusser
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Re: Integrated update mechanism vs. OS’s update mechanism?

Unread post by stevenpusser » 2020-10-19, 04:30

Some distros also offer Pale Moon in their default repositories and maintain the packages themselves, so updates are part of the OS update system and not the application's. Most of those disable Pale Moon's self-update feature when they build it from source, as do I in my OBS repo and MX Linux builds.

https://repology.org/project/palemoon/versions

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