GNOME keeps bugging me with notifications about available software updates. I want to update programs at my own pace and not be bothered by reminders that pop up every two or three days. How can I disable them?
Here is what I’ve tried so far:
In the Software application under “Preferences”, I chose “Manual Updates” and unchecked “Automatic Update Notifications”.
In dconf-editor under /org/gnome/software, I unchecked “allow-updates”, “download-updates” and “download-updates-notify”.
I ran “systemctl disable dnf-makecache.timer --now”.
Why is it so hard to disable those notifications? Is this a bug that I should report? I’m running vanilla Fedora Workstation 42 on a current ThinkPad.
I think it’s not possible to disable the notifications unless you uninstall GNOME Software. The preferences allow to to prevent GNOME Software from automatically preparing an update for you, they don’t allow you to disable warnings when you system requires updates.
The “Automatic Update Notification” (download-updates-notify) setting controls whether Software will show a notification when it automatically installs Flatpak apps in the background. That’s not what you’re looking for.
I want to update programs at my own pace and not be bothered by reminders that pop up every two or three days.
The reminder should appear (a) once every two weeks, or (b) whenever any update is marked Urgent, which, in practice, Fedora generally uses only for Firefox updates and unusual emergencies. It normally shouldn’t be happening every few days, but this week we unfortunately had multiple Firefox updates and also an emergency mutter update.
It’s crazy how the Gnome developers force those update reminders on us. Forced notifcations were a reason why I switched from Windows to Linux many years ago. As @wkmaurom pointed out, I can disable gnome-software from autostarting, but then I will have to kill the process every time I use Gnome Software.
This is a very specific (niche) use-case, in which the user wants to keep GNOME Software, but wants to fully avoid the update notifications, whereas, as we already got accustomed, GNOME prefers simplicity over customization.
Did you consider fully removing GNOME Software, and stay with the CLI tools for package management (dnf and flatpak)? For app browsing and checking GUI app screenshots, descriptions etc, as provided by GNOME Software, one can still go to www.flathub.org.
FWIW, GNOME Software’s automatic updates work rather well and quite seamlessly on atomic desktops (Silverblue), where Flatpaks are installed automatically in the background, while new OSTree commits are deployed in the background whenever available. If users restart the system at least every other week, they mostly won’t see any notifications, just have an up to date system.
I found this thread looking for a solution to a similar or possibly the same issue;
I like to have Gnome Software because it can be useful to search for new packages. I have been running Fedora on my laptop for some time and have only experienced this since the upgrade to 42.
It doesn’t matter if there are actually updates or not, or how long it has been since I ran updates, when I open my laptop it tells me that “Updates are out of date”. That is the notification I am trying to kill. It is not checking for updates, it is just upset that I haven’t in the last hour or some other tiny time limit.
Does anybody know how to kill it or what changed in 42?
I’m using Fedora 42 Workstation on a laptop. It’s annoying to get an update notification at the top of the screen every time that I log onto the machine. I’ve done the same, chose “Manual Updates”, changed the setting in dconf-editor and ran the “disable…” command.
I do want to keep Gnome Software. I like reading the software reviews and having a place to look for new software, but I use CLI tooling to update often and I don’t want pop-ups notifying me.
OK, I myself started receiving these nag notifications last week, so I got annoyed and investigated and reported this bug. The title of the bug is imprecise; it refers to “when automatic updates are enabled,” but the same problem would occur with automatic updates disabled as well, so I think it’s the same issue. I think I’ve just fixed it such that, with the fix applied, you should only receive notifications if it has really been more than 7 days (168 hours) since the last manual check for updates.
But this won’t help you if you want to never check for updates, or if you only check for updates using dnf rather than GNOME Software. If that is the case for you, then I suggest either (a) uninstalling GNOME Software, or (b) manually check for updates with GNOME Software at least once every 168 hours, or (c) create an upstream issue report and hope the developers are sympathetic.
Actually, sorry, it seems there is actually a setting for this already: gsettings set org.gnome.software allow-updates false. This totally disables the update functionality, giving you what you want: you can search for and install apps, without any nag notifications. Except there is a bug and it will currently create the nag notifications anyway. This is already fixed in 49.alpha, and I’ll try to get the fix into 48.4 so you don’t have to wait until Fedora 43 to stop the notifications.
Note this will also get rid of the entire Updates page, so you won’t be able to apply any updates whatsoever using GNOME Software. You’ll probably remember to do your own dnf update and flatpak update, but don’t forget fwupdmgr update.