Are updates rolled out?

[bashveank]

Are updates gradually rolled out, or are they just dropped on the server? I ask because sometimes I'll be in Synaptic and notice that there are some upgrades, but there's no update-manager pop-up telling me about them.

[Joeb454]

It depends how often, and when, the upgrade manager checks for updates.

You can manually do it yourself too, the Update Manager is in System > Administration

[forrestcupp]

Update-manager usually only checks once a day. Updates come out whenever they happen to get them done and posted. If you want to do it manually, just open a terminal and type:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

That will update your repository information and upgrade to newer versions.

But in case you're asking, Ubuntu is not a rolling update distribution like Debian. In between the 6-month releases, they mainly only give security updates and things like that. But if you enable your Backports and Proposed repos, it will give you newer updates for more things.