GNOME Software, which is a native software application of GNOME desktop featured in Fedora and other distributions. It is a user-friendly graphical interface for package management on Linux systems. It serves as a central hub for installing, updating, and removing software applications. While GNOME Software is a handy tool, it might occasionally run in the background, causing unnecessary resource consumption and slowing down your system.
Even if you do not launch it after reboot, or close it, the gnome-software process continues to run in the background. If you keep your system running for days, it consumes memory in order of GBs.
Here’s an example of a Fedora workstation system with an uptime of 3 days, where gnome-software clocks almost 1 GB of RAM.
A 3-year-old ongoing issue causes this, and unfortunately, it affects many system performances.
Here’s how to fix it.
Table of Contents
How to Stop GNOME Software from Running in the Background
Method 1: Using GNOME Software Preferences
- Launch GNOME Software from your applications menu.
- Click on the three horizontal lines in the upper-right corner to open the menu.
- Select “Preferences.”
- Under the “Background” section, toggle off both the options that says “Automatic Updates”, “Automatic Updates Notifications”
Method 2: Using Terminal Commands
- You can use terminal commands to stop GNOME Software background processes if you prefer a more direct approach. The effect is immediate.
- Press
Ctrl+Alt+Tto open a terminal window. - In the terminal, run
ps -el | grep gnome-softwareto ensure that it is running. - Then, run the following command to stop the process.
gnome-software --quit
- Run
ps -el | grep gnome-softwareonce again to ensure the output is empty.
Conclusion
Many users do not know that gnome-software is running in the background and eating up your RAM over GBs, causing a slow response in GNOME desktop. I hope you can easily use these steps to kill the process. I would recommend you to keep checking regularly whether the process started running.
