The Intrusive Warning
Ubuntu features a background monitoring daemon that constantly checks the available storage space on your root and home partitions. When your available space drops below a certain critical threshold (usually around 1GB), the desktop environment aggressively intervenes. It throws a warning notification and automatically launches the GUI “Disk Usage Analyzer” (Baobab) application, forcing it to the front of your screen. If you are intentionally running a server close to capacity, or if you are in the middle of a massive file transfer that you know will temporarily consume the remaining space, having an application suddenly interrupt your workflow is highly irritating.
Silencing the Storage Monitor
To stop Ubuntu from panicking and automatically launching graphical utilities when space is tight, you must modify the internal settings of the GNOME settings daemon.
This configuration cannot be changed through the standard settings menu; you must use the gsettings command-line tool. Open your terminal application (Ctrl+Alt+T). To completely disable the low disk space warning and the automatic launching of the analyzer, type the following command exactly: gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.housekeeping active false and press Enter. The command will execute silently without outputting a confirmation message. The background daemon will immediately stop monitoring your storage volumes. You are now entirely responsible for monitoring your own disk space, but you will never again be interrupted by the sudden appearance of the Disk Usage Analyzer.