How do I utterly stop automatic update checks in Ubuntu 19.04?

I have tried many suggestions, and none of them work. I don't want my Ubuntu system to touch the network in any way shape or form to check for updates until I explicitly run an update check.

I've set the check to "Never" in the GUI app with the repos. I've disabled every systemd timer that says something about update. Still I get update-notifier notifications popping up from time to time.

What on earth do I have to do to stamp out this scourge on Ubuntu 19.04?

Note that I don't want to just disable the update-notifier popup; I want to disable all network traffic doing the update check.

More details on what I have already done:

systemctl disable apt-daily-upgrade.timer apt-daily.timer

Run Software & Updates, go to Updates tab set "Automatically check for updates" to "Never".

I had the same problem. ‘Automatically check for updates’ set to ‘Never’ in the ‘Software & Updates’ dialogue but repositories still being updated (i.e. the equivalent of running sudo apt-get update) and then updates suggested for download by update-notifier (I presume because I still had ‘When there are [x] updates’ set to ‘Display immediately’).

Reading the answer to this question (How can I ban Software Updater from checking for updates at certain times of day or certain days of week?) has led me to this answer:

• gnome-software is doing it
• I have uninstalled it (sudo apt-get purge gnome-software) and – so far as I can tell – the repositories are no longer being automatically updated
• I didn’t try it, but the link above and my reading of the dconfig page for it (‘Description: If enabled, GNOME Software automatically downloads updates in the background and prompts the user to install them when ready’) suggests that using dconfig to set /org/gnome/software/download-updates to false, or just running gsettings set org.gnome.software download-updates false, will also do the trick

You may also need to remove unattended-upgrades (sudo apt-get purge unattended-upgrades), but I had done that already and it didn’t stop the problem dealt with here. Put another way, removing unattended-upgrades may also be necessary to deal with this problem but it is not sufficient.

Incidentally, I think that this is a bug, or at least a mistake. If a user (who just wants to use Ubuntu out of the box without coming to AskUbuntu or similar sites to get under the hood) sets a system setting called ‘Automatically check for updates’ to ‘Never’ then a piece of default software should not cut across that decision. I have seen a number of people argue, well, it is in their best interests to have automatic updates, sure, perhaps it is, but if they are given the option to say they don’t want them, and they take it, then they shouldn’t get them!

Commenting out all the repos mentioned in /etc/apt/sources.list (and sources.list.d/* if there are any) seems to do the trick. I still have no idea what is the origin of the unstoppable tasks desperately wanting to tell me about updates, but if there are no repos defined, it seems to thwart them.

For all those wondering why I want to turn them off: This is a virtual machine operating in a qcow2 image with a backing file, and it is destined to be completely reset to the original backing file after testing. I don't want network activity screwing up my testing, and if it did download updates, it would all be wasted effort since they will be discarded when the file image is reset to the base state again. Fortunately it was simple to add a little script to guestmount the image and edit sources.list every time I reset the file image.

I have disabled several services in an attempt to prevent the automatic checking for upgrades:

sudo systemctl disable apt-daily.service apt-daily-upgrade.service
sudo systemctl disable apt-daily.timer apt-daily-upgrade.timer
sudo apt remove --purge -y unattended-upgrades
gsettings set com.ubuntu.update-notifier no-show-notifications true

I also remove the snaps, as these check by default, 4 times / day:

sudo snap remove $(snap list | awk ' !/^Name|^core/ {print $1}')
sudo apt remove --purge -y snapd gnome-software-plugin-snap

You can set the update-notifier not to show notifications, either by GUI or by CLI.

CLI

gsettings set com.ubuntu.update-notifier no-show-notifications true

GUI

Open the program dconf-editor and navigate to

"com->ubuntu->update-notifier" and toggle the switch for "no-show-notifications"

Uninstalling update-notifier should take care of the notices.

sudo apt remove update-notifier update-notifier-common