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Gnome-software, which is one of the top memory consumers, is being loaded at startup and thus decreasing boot time. enter image description here

I rarely use gnome-software, and on most boot-ups it is useless. However there is not an entry at start-up apps, not even after showing hidden startup apps. Also, I haven't found any gnome-software-related process from systemd-analyze to disable it with systemctl.

wjandrea
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TheLinuxGK
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4 Answers4

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Go to /etc/xdg/autostart/gnome-software-service.desktop and remove the line

NoDisplay=true

or change true to false. Then GNOME Software should appear in your Startup Applications list. You can disable it from there.

If GNOME Software still doesn't appear in Startup Applications list following the suggestion above, follow the steps below.

  1. Copy /etc/xdg/autostart/gnome-software-service.desktop to the ~/.config/autostart/ directory.

  2. Open the copied .desktop file with a text editor and remove the line

    NoDisplay=true

    or change true to false.

  3. Now GNOME Software should appear in your Startup Applications list. Disable it. Alternatively, you may append an

    X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=false

    line to the copied .desktop file.

wjandrea
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pomsky
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From https://ask.fedoraproject.org/en/question/92941/how-to-stop-fedora-24-gnome-software-auto-updating/, try these two options:

  1. Disable it in gsettings

    gsettings set org.gnome.software download-updates false

  2. If that fails .. mask (disable) the backend service, PackageKit, the service used by Gnome Software.

    sudo systemctl mask packagekit.service
Panther
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  • Following your instructions, I noticed that upon bootup, gnome software is seen loaded at system-monitor, and after some seconds it exits. This solves the ram-consume-problem but slowing-bootup persists. – TheLinuxGK Sep 25 '17 at 19:02
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    Debugging boot is different. Did you mask packagekit ? Debugging boot is almost another question, but did you run blame ? https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/systemd-blame.html – Panther Sep 25 '17 at 19:08
  • Masking packagekit worked best for me as, although gnome-software will blurt errors when the user logs in and every time systemd runs fwupd (Firmware Update Daemon). – hackerb9 Nov 23 '24 at 21:54
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For Ubuntu 22.04, I found none of the suggestions above helpful. While I was able to see Gnome Software in Startup Applications, disabling it here did not help. Removing both the global desktop file and the local one did not stop it from starting.

It is started because it is a service defined here:

/usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.gnome.Software.service

In that directory, do:

sudo mv org.gnome.Software.service org.gnome.Software.service_disabled

I don't know what side effects this has yet.

Tim Richardson
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  • It's been a year, what side effects has disabling it that way had? – hackerb9 Nov 23 '24 at 21:28
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    By the way, disabling something by modifying /usr/share is not completely permanent. Ubuntu, like most systems that follow the Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, gives no guarantee that it will not reset files in /usr/share during a software update. Typically, a local sysadmin is supposed to edit a file in /etc. – hackerb9 Nov 23 '24 at 21:37
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I also had this problem and modifying these 2 files had no impact. gnome-software still launched after Linux startup
Setting below 2 lines in these 2 files had no impact: /etc/xdg/autostart/gnome-software-service.desktop and ~/.config/autostart/gnome-software-service.desktop
Hidden=true
NoDisplay=true
Removing these 2 files also had no impact

I noticed that gnome-software applet was popping up whenever I launched an application installed with snap so it can be related to snap store
I found suspicious location regarding gnome-software in snap-store related folders like this
/snap/snap-store/current/usr/etc/xdg/autostart/gnome-software-service.desktop
Tried to modify or remove that file but couldn't do that even with admin privileges because /snap/snap-store seems to be mounted as read only filesystem according to lsblk command

so the solution might be to remove gnome-software from snap
snap list | grep gnome
snap remove <gnome-software related app>

or to remove gnome-software using apt
sudo apt remove gnome-software*
sudo apt purge gnome-software*
sudo apt autoremove
surprisingly removing using apt somehow also removed this file from snap-store folder
/snap/snap-store/current/usr/bin/gnome-software
which was pointed out in gnome-software-service.desktop file
Exec=/snap/snap-store/current/usr/bin/gnome-software --gapplication-service

After that gnome-software pop-ups disappeared

pangratt12345
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