If you use Ubuntu version 18.04 LTS or newer, you’ll soon be seeing Apt News in the Software Updater GUI.
If you’ve not experienced APT News, the idea behind it (according to Canonical) is to give users as much information as possible about recent updates, so they can decide if those updates should be applied or not. Essentially, APT News is an unobtrusive feature that presents timely news, related to installed packages.
The APT News portion of the Software Updater will be presented near the top of the GUI window and can be expanded to read, otherwise, it will default to unexpanded.
The information presented will include things like significant security updates, features, and/or services. This news section also will inform you when regular support has ended for a release, which should be considered a very handy bit of information to know to help users understand it’s time to upgrade to a supported release.
For those who would rather not see this news, Canonical has made it possible to disable with the command pro config set apt-news=false. Otherwise, APT News will be presented in both the terminal and the Software Updater GUI.
Another thing to keep in mind is that you’ll get more information if you sign up for Ubuntu Pro, which is free for personal use.
At this time, there is no definitive date when the APT News feature will land in the Software Updater, but I’d expect it sooner, rather than later.
This story was originally reported on OMG! Ubuntu!
