Let's go. We can't. Why not? We're waiting for Godot.

My first attempt to shutdown a newly installed Fedora 32 system presented me with this:

Swell, what fun. I can't just shut down and be done, Nooo! I have to wait for updates to be installed. Updates I didn't ask for and didn't want. What if I'm trying to board a plane and I have to turn off my laptop? What if a power failure hit and the system is automatically shutting down before the battery dies? What if I just want to be in charge of when updates happen?

So the quest begins: To find the obnoxious source of this "helpful" feature and squash it like a bug!

This fedora users thread provided the answer: the packagekit-offline-update.service. Poking around in that vicinity, I also found the fwudp-offline-update.service which is probably equally annoying.

To make absolutely sure this is the source of the problem, I did a fresh install and booted it. I waited till a gnome notification showed up saying "Important OS and application updates are ready to be installed", then I asked to shutdown the system. This time I hit the ESC key to see the actual messages, and this showed up:

Examining the offline update service file shows it does indeed contain the string "...whilst offline", so that confirms the the source of the annoyance. My quest is at an end.