No update notification by default

Project Discussion Desktop
1

This is a follow-up to Update manager never popping up which happened to be mistitled after a bit of investigation).

The new behaviour of update-notifier out-of-the-box in Ubuntu 26.04, configured with com.ubuntu.update-notifier show-updates-status-icon false, is to hide both its tray icon and its notifications (regardless of time conditions and other configurations, since as coded no tray icon entails hiding the notification).

I think this default behaviour must be changed since :

  • Users using will never be notified of any regular update

  • Users opting out of unattended-upgrades will never be notified of any update of any kind, security included

  • Users wanting to be periodically notified of standard updates (e.g. every 7 days) have no way to to do it without enabling a tray icon showing immediately when updates are available.

What could be done, I think is

  • to enable notifications to be sent even when the tray icon is hidden

  • and rely on the existing parameter (com.ubuntu.update-notifier no-show-notifications) to hide notifications if unwanted.

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To quote moderators on the original thread:
As stated in a related bug report:

Perhaps this is the place to have that discussion, @3v1n0 ? I think, the major sticking point is that it’s hard to opt-in, because, as far as we know, there is no other way than resorting to gsettings; not exactly what Ubuntu users have come to expect.

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OMG Ubuntu! just published an article on this issue:

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2026/07/ubuntu-26-04-update-notifications-disabled

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My apologies, this is indeed a bug and not a design choice.

The design choice is to avoid constantly showing an icon in the top-right panel whenever updates are available by default. That was something we’ve trialed in 25.10 and decided to not keep around for 26.04, or at least not by default.

The bug is that this unintentionally lead to not showing notifications.

Thank you for raising a bug report in launchpad, that is the correct course of action for suspected bugs.

4 Likes
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Thank you very much for raising this. I was the user to whom that response was directed - my comment was pretty benign and I definitely didn’t want to argue with anyone so I just deleted my comment.

I thought I was going mad, surely this can’t have been the intended behaviour. It seems like that is actually the case.