Or, alternatively, switch away from environments where that sort of pestering behavior is common!<p>I haven't used Linux in a while, but from what I remember it was rare to have a program itself tell me there were updates necessary, but the package manager globally managed those things for me on its own schedule.<p>The Mac application community has the fantastic Sparkle framework that lets individual applications poll for updates. This isn't nearly as bad as it sounds: generally speaking, applications have preferences to opt-out of automatic updates, and the updates include complete changelogs. It's gotten to the point where if an application <i>doesn't</i> include Sparkle, I get annoyed.<p>In short, the posters issues aren't with Automatic Updates, they're with an environment that doesn't respect users.