KDE Daemon System Notification Helper annoyances

Updated: December 5, 2025

You would think Windows is annoying when it comes to its updates. But at least there’s one entity doing the updating, and if you handle it, you’re sorted. Not so in Kubuntu, or most Plasma systems, I’m afraid. Recently, especially since I installed and/or updated a bunch of systems to 24.04, I’ve been seeing more and more restart required prompts. But not one. Nope. A torrent. A barrage of notifications popping, one after another, sometimes three, sometimes eleven. And they would happen without my intervention, which is alarming.

As it happens, I don’t like automatic updates, so I keep them off. Or so I thought, because no matter what I chose through the Discover GUI, Kubuntu would still ignore my wishes and occasionally run a background update, and then annoy me with pointless messages, always when I don’t want or expect them. I found a second place to cull this unwarranted noise, but still, this wasn’t enough. Then, a third place. My oh my. In today’s tutorial, I will show you how to get rid of the KDE Daemon update reboot message deluge. After me, if you please.

Missing information

OK, let’s assume the system is configured to auto-update. And there’s an update that requires a reboot. In that case, if there’s a reboot prompt, I would expect it to tell me WHY it wants that. Because if I’m not aware there’s a background process running, then for that matter, you could have "malware" updating your machine. Sure, the possibility of something like that is very low, but why the opaqueness then?

A much more elegant solution would be to tell me what update requires the reboot. Cleaner, more information, and an optional toggle to remove that notification. But if there’s an "unattended" upgrade running on my box, then yes, I need the details. When I run my own update, either through Discover or on the command line, I can see the exact sequence of steps. Not so here. Not trivially anyway.

Of course, no Linux system is truly a system, more a collection of disparate parts barely working together. This is why, if you want to get rid of this annoying popup, you need to edit THREE separate configurations. Yup.

Step 1: Disable auto-updates through Discover

First, open the GUI package manager, click on the dots (the desktop "irony") to get into the Settings. Alternatively, go through Settings > System Administration > Software Update. The thing is, the "split" between Ubuntu and Kubuntu means the latter only has a cosmetic set of tools available this way, whereas in the past, the (K)Ubuntu update manager utility let you enable/disable PPAs, enable repo archives, install drivers and more. All of these are remnants of a better past, as the Linux desktop has regressed since.

Set updates to Manually, leave notifications as you like, and of course, don’t use that completely unnecessary Offline updates nonsense, which gives you a "Windows like" update experience. But still, this won’t do much, as you will still be bombarded with the restart popups now and then.

As an aside, the old tool, which had everything:

From my Kubuntu 19.04 review. You can sort everything here, you don’t need seven places.

Step 2: Disable unattended upgrades service

Next, you need to disable the service that runs updates on its own.

sudo systemctl disable unattended-upgrades.service

But this only handles /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades. There’s also 20auto-upgrades scheduled task, and it will still run and install nonsense and annoy you.

Step 3: Disable apt auto-update configuration

You’d think the above is enough, but no. There are multiple services and scheduled tasks, all in charge of more or less the same thing. The duplication and triplication comes from the fact Ubuntu and Kubuntu are separate systems, so they all handle the updates, only differently. Furthermore, there’s no proper integration. The toggles you’d expect to work don’t, and then the toggles you want don’t exist. And so forth. A mess.

Thus, the third and final piece. You need to actually tell apt not to do any auto upgrades. Go to /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20auto-upgrades, and open the file. Look for the following lines:

APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "1"; APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade "1";

Change those "1s" to "0s":

APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "0"; APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade "0";

And now, maybe, finally, hopefully, you won’t be pestered anymore. Maybe ...

And that’s the gist of it. No matter how the patching is now invoked - Discover, some update cron or service or whatnot, another badly designed piece of GUI that does not belong, whatever - you won’t be bothered, and you will be able to run the updates when you like it, and reboot when you like it. Speaking of overbearing and obtuse processes. This makes Windows 11 look almost fun in comparison.

Conclusion

Three different places to tell the system not to bother you. This is, because, Linux is not a product but an amalgamation of disparate parts, somehow joined together, and every piece doings its own thing in complete and utter nerdy isolation. Kubuntu is also to blame, and Plasma, too, for reinventing the update wheel with a different UI. The worst part is not the updates - it’s how difficult it is to manage them, and of course, the stupid torrent of popups. That annoys me the most. Not the fact it’s one gentle prompt. No, it’s two minutes of crap while you’re doing important things. Randomly.

I so hate how modern systems are designed for some sort of Utopian scenario. You don’t boot your machine for a few days? As soon as you log in, update services are running, wasting your bandwidth. Services that compete with each other no less. Check the process table, and you’ll find three or four different instances of apt running there. There’ll be python3 scripts, there’ll be daemons, there’ll be scheduled jobs, everything. Noise and ignorance. An assumption that bandwidth is limitless, and that people have nothing better to do than administer their systems. Especially since the risk of not doing updates right away is practically low. Nothing at all will happen on the desktop if you don’t update for a day or five. Ubuntu/Kubuntu has no open ports. It’s about as safe as it gets. And, most importantly, my home ain’t a data center somewhere. This ain’t corpo stuff. But yeah, this is server stuff blindly implemented, and the concept of philosophical enjoyment does not exist. We’re done here. Take care.

Cheers.