How to disable notification about updates on startup in KDE 5?

Question

I want to handle all updates manually (through aptitude in my case) and to not have any kind of automatic updates, nor do I want to receive any notifications about updates.

What I tried:

1. I've unchecked checkbox "Check for updates" as per forum thread. This checkbox in KDE5 is in /usr/bin/sorware-properties-kde window. This window can also be opened through: Discover > Settings (in sidebar) > "hamburger" menu in the top right corner > "Software sources" > "Updates" tab.

2. I have also set "Automatically check for updates" in /usr/bin/software-properties-gtk window to "Never".

3. There is an old question Disable automated updates (and notifications) in Kde Debian, but it seems that it does not apply to KDE5.

Just after logging into KDE, I receive a notification about needing to do updates.

How do I disable this unwanted notification at startup of KDE? What drives this notification? Is it some automatic check for updates? Or is just having some information about updates in the system enough for the notification to appear? How do I disable the underlying check for updates that drives this notification, if there is such a check?

Answer 1

Packagekit will check for updates upon login and refresh package lists through a systemd unit.

Then there is software that uses packagekit like Discover to check if there are update packages. Discover uses the system tray to show the number of update packages.

Then there are notifications popping up when new packages become available also by Discover which are made through the notifications system.

To just disable the notification search for Notifications in settings and go to the Discover event source to change how notifications are registered.

You can also remove Discover from the system tray. By configuring the panel, hovering over system tray and clicking configure. Then from that dialog deselect the "Updates" tray item.

Answer 2

For me, I am running KDE Plasma 5.20.5. I turn off the discover update app (system tray icon) by running the following command:

$ sudo rm /etc/xdg/autostart/org.kde.discover.notifier.desktop

Basically, remove the file org.kde.discover.notifier.desktop from /etc/xdg/autostart/.

Answer 3

I was able to disable Discover/PackageKit based updates by removing PK entirely:

rpm -e PackageKit PackageKit-command-not-found plasma-discover-packagekit

Answer 4

A Less Invasive Approach

The key is to stop DiscoverNotifier from automatically starting as part of your desktop session.

Rather than removing Discover entirely (which would affect all users and lose access to Discover's other features) you can disable the notifier for just one user. You may have to do it in two places, because both the Xorg autostart facility and the Plasma session manager normally try to launch it.

Step 1.

Copy the desktop file from the global autostart directory to your home autostart directory, and add a Hidden=true line in your copy to disable it. You can do this with Dolphin and Kate, or at the command line as follows:

mkdir -p ~/.config/autostart
sed '/^\[Desktop Entry\]/ a Hidden=true' \
  < /etc/xdg/autostart/org.kde.discover.notifier.desktop \
  > ~/.config/autostart/org.kde.discover.notifier.desktop

Step 2a.

Kill the already-running DiscoverNotifier instance. You can do this in the GUI with System Monitor, or at the command line with pkill DiscoverNotif .

If you use System Monitor, note that the process you want to kill may appear as /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libexec/DiscoverNotifier or some other name that isn't obvious at first glance.

Step 2b.

Tell the plasma session manager not to launch DiscoverNotifier when you log in. The key is in System Settings: Startup and Shutdown: Desktop Session: Session Restore: On login, launch apps that were open...

• If "Start with an empty session" is selected, that alone is sufficient. You're done.
• If "On last logout" is selected, you must exit all applications that you don't want to auto-start, and then log out.
• If "When session was manually saved" is selected, you must exit all applications that you don't want to auto-start, and then click the Save Session button in the Application Launcher menu.

For the record, I think the Plasma 5 session manager saves startup apps in ~/.config/ksmserverrc . I recommend using the GUI (as described above) rather than editing this file manually, because the latter is more error-prone.