How often must I update the 4 main template qubes: debian-11, whonix-ws-16, whonix-gw-16 and fedora-36
Manually updating them via the sudo apt update and sudo apt upgrade in the case of the first 3, for example.
As they usually have packages to be updated even when the Qubes Update tool shows no available update for any of them.
This sounds a bit strange, to be honest, as Fedora-36 has been EOL for quite a while…
Otherwise, this is either a bug, in which case it would be nice if you did some more investigating and reported it to GitHub or you aren’t running any AppVMs based on the debian-11 or whonix templates with sufficient web connectivity, so that they could check for updates; the way update checking works in QubesOS is that an AppVM will try to check for updates for its template (will fail if it doesn’t have sufficient internet access) and will notify dom0 if it finds any.
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You may not receive notifications to update a template if you don’t use qubes with network access that are based on that template:
By default, most qubes that are connected to the internet will periodically check for updates for their parent templates. If updates are available, you will receive a notification as described above. However, if you have any templates that do not have any online child qubes, you will not receive update notifications for them. Therefore, you should regularly update such templates manually instead.
Source (permalink to the relevant section):
How often you want to check for updates manually depends on:
- how often each distribution publishe updates (e.g. Fedora typically publishes updates more often than Debian)
- how often/quick you want to update the templates (e.g. you may find less problematic if a template used only with offline qubes is a bit out of date, that’s entirely for you to judge).
Subscribing to the distribution change logs or update announcements may be a way to figure out when they are updated, including if updates are published outside of their regular schedule.
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