My /etc/pamac.conf has the line
RefreshPeriod = 24
yet it seems to be checking for updates hourly. I vaguely remember telling it to do so, but can’t for the life of me remember how. Has anyone an idea of what I did, or how it might have starting acting this way?
I apologize in advance for whatever stupid thing I did to cause this. Truly a senior moment.
Perhaps - if you added it “by hand” - you may have two of these in there - and the first or the last one read is used?
grep Refresh /etc/pamac.conf
That’s not what my window looks like; I don’t have the 3 dots in the upper right corner.
But you do have access to the Settings somewhere.
The picture was not mine, btw - it’s probably what pamac-manager looks like in KDE/Plasma.
For me (Xfce4), the “three dots” are also at the top, but in vertical orientation and not at the far right, but farther in.
Mine was the implicit recommendation to run that command
grep Refresh /etc/pamac.conf
in a terminal,
to check whether you may have duplicate (conflicting) entries in that configuration file.
It’s pamac-gtk3, which for now is the recommended pamac-manager GUI for Plasma systems. Xfce and GNOME use pamac-gtk, which is gtk4-based. 
Also, the three dots — for bringing up the settings menu — are in the upper right corner of the window in my user account because I have my window control buttons on the left, as in macOS.
I had pamac-gtk3 installed, so I installed pamac-gtk instead (since I’m on Xfce). Still no 3 dots anywhere, but I no longer get the gtk3-critial messages.
Only one RefreshPeriod = 24 in pamac.conf.
I thought this might be a theme issue, so I started pamac-tray as
GTK_THEME=matcha-dark-sea pamac-tray &
Results were:
I had previously set the xfce theme to the same, as can be seen by the top of the terminal window above pamac.
The gear icon should open the settings, if that’s what you’re looking for.
You do have some way to access the settings, no?
… probably the gear icon as @dmt said …
This is what it looks like with the “really” default theme:
You can see the “three dots” fourth place from the right?
I didn’t execute:
which got me nothing at all, btw …
I simply opened a terminal and issued:
pamac-manager
…
I actually used:
LANG=C pamac-manager
because otherwise the menus and all would have been in german …
since that is what my UI is set to
the theme set was the default this installation came with:
Matcha-sea
what was the actual result of:
?
… don’t conclude or summarize yourself, based upon what you think you found
just give the output of the command - and have the audience (which you invited) decide what it means …
[Stable Update] 2023-07-10 - Known Issues and Solutions
2023-07-10
Pamac GUI theme does not match theme for Xfce
pamac-gtk11.0.1 uses Gtk 4 that is not supported by Xfce
user can replace pamac-gtk with pamac-gtk3
pamac install pamac-gtk3
FYI:
my (Xfce4) installation is default
and it uses pamac-gtk3
so:
this is what is installed in Xfce4 and what the linked picture represents
extra/pamac-gtk3 10.7.0-1 [installed]
A Package Manager based on libalpm with AUR and Appstream support (GTK3)
I see the dots in your png file, but it seems that no matter what I try, I can’t see them. I set the xcfe4 theme to matcha-sea, no change.
grep Refresh /etc/pamac.conf
RefreshPeriod = 24
I tried GTK_THEME=matcha-sea pamac-tray &
and the window title bar is now gray (when focussed), but still no 3 dots.
… and you have no access to the settings?
… through the gear icon, presumably? (in your screenshot)
How do you know that it checks every hour, rather than only once a day?
An interval, a period, of every one hour, isn’t even available to be set via the GUI - the minimum period is 3 hours.
Then there is 6 hours, 12 hours, each day (24 hours) and once every week.
No more options via GUI - to set it to one hour is not possible through the GUI.
I have no luck with either pamac-gtk or pamac-gtk3. Yes, I know what the settings allow. However, I get a message
updates_checker.vala:59: check updates
every hour. This comes out of libpamac, which is linked into both pamac-tray and pamac-manager, but oddly enough, not pamac-daemon.
Where?
How do you get it?
… it is your interpretation from that message that
Pamac checking updates every hour instead of every day
?
which then would likely be quite a misleading statement.
I do not find “vala” or “checker” or “updates_” anywhere in the system journal of a system installed in February this year.
I do find it in the journal of a Gnome system which is much older - about a year old.
Where do you get this from?
and
Why do you ask about it?
I get it in a terminal window I keep open:
** Message: 19:38:45.768: updates_checker.vala:59: check updates
This began when I set pamac to ignore gimp updates.
That is my interpretation. A search for updates_checker.vala gets a hit at
You can see in the source that it seems to be the source of the message.
The message is irritating.
in which you run:
journalctl -f
or you start the program from a terminal and get this after some time
You could have said that right from the start.
mkay
That may be.
It took quite some time to find that out.
Get over it?
Or don’t look at it?
Or ask a better question?
yes - I saw that
not there, but somewhere else
and …?
“What is the actual problem?”
should have been the first question.
I’m out.
I remember playing with the RefreshPeriod setting. If you manually edit the setting to an arbitrary value then Pamac chokes on it.
Use the predefined values in the Pamac Manager GUI to be sure the RefreshPeriod setting is something Pamac understands.
And a word of advise - don’t set it to check too often - once a week should be enough on stable branch. As for my personal preference - I remove all update nagging - only execute an update when I have time to deal with potential issues - and never on shutdown as I want my system to actually work next morning.