How to disable notifications on debian

Sun, Oct 28, 2018

The best solution is to install another notification manager and configure it to not show notifications:

$ sudo apt install dunst

This will exchange the current notification manager with the new one.

Now configure dunst to not show notifications:

$ cat<<ENDL > ~/.config/dunst/dunstrc
[ignore]
    summary = "*"
    format = ""
ENDL

Alternatively, you can tell it to suspend showing notifications instead of displaying them immediately. Dunst will queue them up while in suspended state.

$ killall -SIGUSR1 dunst

You can disable the suspended state with SIGUSR2, like so:

$ killall -SIGUSR2 dunst

Why?

Notifications are not a useful UI paradigm for me. They always happen to appear exactly where I just wanted to read/click something else. When I would have needed the information in the notification I am sure to miss it because I did not pay attention to the general area where the notification appears. Also, it can be very distracting at times.