The GNOME Color Profile Daemon
In Ubuntu desktop environments, gsd-color (the GNOME Settings Daemon Color plugin) is a background service responsible for managing color profiles. Its primary job is to apply specific ICC color profiles to your monitors to ensure color accuracy, which is vital for professional photographers, graphic designers, or video editors using calibrated displays. It also handles features like “Night Light,” which shifts your screen’s color temperature warmer in the evenings to reduce blue light exposure.
However, if you are running Ubuntu in a Virtual Machine, over a Remote Desktop connection, or on a headless server where you have accidentally installed a graphical desktop environment, this daemon is completely useless. Virtual displays and remote protocols rarely support hardware color calibration profiles. In these scenarios, gsd-color will sometimes continuously poll the system, generate warnings in your system logs about missing display hardware, and consume unnecessary RAM. If you do not use hardware color calibration or Night Light, you should disable this daemon.
How to Disable the Gsd-color Service
Because gsd-color is a component of the GNOME Settings Daemon rather than a standalone systemd service, the most effective way to stop it across all user sessions is to prevent the executable from running.
Warning: Disabling this will permanently break the “Night Light” feature and custom monitor color profiles on your Ubuntu desktop.
- Open your Ubuntu Terminal.
- You can prevent the daemon from launching by stripping its execute permissions. Run the following command:
sudo chmod -x /usr/libexec/gsd-color(Note: On older versions of Ubuntu, the binary might be located at /usr/lib/gnome-settings-daemon/gsd-color).
- Restart your computer, or log out and log back into your GNOME session.
Your Ubuntu system will no longer launch the color management plugin, freeing up memory and stopping any related graphical polling errors on virtualized displays.