I thought I’ll make this thread for all of you out there who have questions but are afraid to ask them. This is your chance!
I’ll try my best to answer any questions here, but I hope others in the community will contribute too!
I understand sudo needs a password
You can configure sudo to not need a password for certain commands. Unfortunately the syntax and documentation for that is not easily readable. Doas which can be installed and used along side sudo is easier.
For software updates you can go for unattended-upgrades though if you turn off your computer when it is upgrading software you may have to fix the broken pieces.
I’ve tried unattended-upgrades once. And I couldn’t get it to work back then. It might be more user friendly now. Or it could just be me.
It’s not really user friendly, at least not how I know it. But useful for servers and when desktop computers are on for a long time.
It would be a matter of enabling or disabling it with : sudo dpkg-reconfigure unattended-upgrades granted that you have the unattended-upgrades package installed.
In that case I’m not sure when the background updates will start, though according to the Debian wiki the time for this can be configured.
But with Ubuntu a desktop user should be able to configure software updated to be done automatically via a GUI. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AutomaticSecurityUpdates#Using_GNOME_Update_Manager
