The GNOME CUPS Integration
In Ubuntu, the GNOME Settings Daemon (GSD) handles various system-level integrations for the desktop environment. One of its specialized plugins is gsd-print-notifications. The sole purpose of this background service is to monitor the CUPS (Common UNIX Printing System) spooler and generate native GNOME desktop notifications regarding print jobs. When you send a document to your printer, this daemon is responsible for popping up the little alert bubbles telling you that the “Job has started,” “Printer is out of paper,” or “Print job completed successfully.”
For standard office users, these notifications provide helpful feedback. However, if you are running a kiosk, a dedicated point-of-sale terminal that prints receipts continuously, or a print server where the graphical session is only used for management, having constant pop-up notifications sliding into the top of the screen for every single printed page is incredibly annoying and distracting. If you want your system to print silently without generating graphical alerts in the GNOME shell, you can safely disable this specific plugin.
How to Disable the Gsd-print-notifications Service
Because gsd-print-notifications is loaded dynamically by the main GNOME Settings Daemon, it cannot be stopped using standard systemd tools like systemctl. You must remove the binary’s ability to execute.
- Open your Ubuntu Terminal.
- To disable the print notification plugin, remove its execute permissions by running the following command:
sudo chmod -x /usr/libexec/gsd-print-notifications(Note: Depending on your specific version of Ubuntu, the plugin binary might be located in /usr/lib/gnome-settings-daemon/gsd-print-notifications).
- Restart your computer, or log out of your current GNOME session and log back in for the changes to take effect.
GNOME will no longer monitor CUPS for job statuses, and your print jobs will process silently in the background without triggering desktop alerts.