Brave popup - how to delete?

[Keith]

On 11/7/22 10:51 PM, rikona wrote:
> On Mon, 7 Nov 2022 12:02:11 -0600
> Keith <keith at caramail.com> wrote:
> 
>> On 11/7/22 2:15 AM, rikona wrote:
>>> On Sun, 6 Nov 2022 08:50:00 -0600
>>> Keith <keith at caramail.com> wrote:
>>>    
>>>> On 11/5/22 5:54 PM, rikona wrote:
>>>>> Running Brave browser in Kubuntu. Runs OK but update installed a
>>>>> popup window that in on top in every desktop. Closing it gives
>>>>> another one in a few minutes - essentially always there covering
>>>>> something desirable in EVERY desktop/every app. One net solution
>>>>> was to run snap update but doesn't work in all cases, and not in
>>>>> mine. This is a PITA and so bad I may stop using Brave. But, is
>>>>> there SOME way to get rid of this popup, or at least have it STAY
>>>>> closed?
>>>>>
>>>>> And if it does stay closed or not come up constantly on your box,
>>>>> can I find out why that is?
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks,
>>>>> Rik
>>>>>       
>>>>
>>>> Doesn't Kubuntu have a way to configure notification settings? In
>>>> Ubuntu, you'd navigate to Settings->Notifications->Snap User
>>>> Session Agent. There you can turn off pop-up banner notifications
>>>> whenever there are snap updates. I assume that Kubuntu has a
>>>> similar feature to control notification settings since one of the
>>>> advantages of KDE touted by its users is how configurable it is.
>>>
>>> Settings->Notifications-> has NOTHING about Snap at all
>>> AND
>>> Brave ignores EVERY setting in Notifications!
>>>    
>>>> Plus, Brave may have a settings option for notifications within the
>>>> application itself. You might check into that.
>>>
>>> Nothing in Brave settings and NOTHING on Brave website either!
>>>
>>> Many complaints online but no fix I could find that worked. I was
>>> hoping someone here might have an idea to prevent that popup window
>>> at a code level, or perhaps auto-close it if it does pop up.
>>>
>>>    
>>
>> Hmm. Surprising that Snapd User Session Agent isn't listed under the
>> Configure Applications dialog from the Notifications section under
>> System-Settings. Its .desktop file (io.snapcraft.SessionAgent) is
>> found in /usr/share/applications, so I would have expected it to be
>> listed like it is in Ubuntu:
> 
> I do have io.snapcraft.SessionAgent in that dir but nothing 'snap' in
> the Notifications section.
> 
> I do have "local system message service" as a Notifications item but
> don't know what that does.

Yeah, I don't either. I'm just not familiar with KDE and Plasma and all 
that. From my brief googlin', found that Plasma holds some information 
about notifications specs of non-KDE applications in 
~/.config/plasmanotifyrc. Parse that and see if there's any mention of 
the snap user session agent or even just snapd. If there is, then 
editing that file might work.

Can you issue the following commands?

$ gsettings --version
$ ls -l ~/.config/dconf/user

Maybe there's another angle to try if none of the above work.

>>
>> https://snapcraft.io/docs/refresh-awareness#heading--notification
>>
>> Anyways
>>
>> One thing you might try after refreshing Brave from the command-line
>> is to stop snap-store and then restart it. Sometimes the snap-store
>> has cached information about pending updates that doesn't
>> automatically get updated after a command-line manual refresh. So it
>> might still show a snap has an update available when it really
>> doesn't. Stopping the snap-store and then restarting it will usually
>> force it to refresh its cache.
> 
> Will this cause other/all snaps to stop/start and possibly lose data?
> 
>>
No, this is just the snap package store app. No other snap applications 
or services will be affected. By adding the "--quit" option you're 
shutting the application down gracefully.

Actually, I found that Plasma has its own package management application 
called Discover. So if "Ubuntu Software" (snap-store) isn't installed, 
then closing and restarting Plasma Discover may be do the trick. 
Snap-store, gnome-software, and Plasma Discover all use packagekit under 
the hood to perform their actual package management. Packagekit uses a 
backend process to handle snaps. Apparently (and I'm guessing from 
observation here and not any actual debugging) bypassing the gui store 
and, hence, packagekit, and refreshing snaps manually doesn't signal to 
packagekit to update its status about pending snap updates.

>> (no sudo)
>> $ snap-store --quit
>>
>> (no sudo)
>> ALT-F2 for Run command: snap-store
>>
>> If that doesn't help then I suppose that you can mask the
>> snapd.session-agent.service user service to disable it and prevent
>> any notifications from snapd from appearing on the desktop.
>>
>> (Since the service is run with user privileges, sudo is not necessary)
>> $ systemctl --user stop snapd.session-agent.service (if its running)
> 
> How can I see if it is running?

$ systemctl --user status snapd.session-agent.service

On my system, it is usually not running. When you issue the "stop" 
command, there'll be a warning that it can be activated by 
snapd.session-agent.socket. That's normal. If you want, you can issue 
the "status" command first and skip the "stop" command if its not running.
> 
>> $ systemctl --user mask snapd.session-agent.service
> 
> What else will this stop besides the popup?

This will disable all notifications from the snapd daemon. If you 
examine its service file in /usr/lib/systemd/user, you'll see the line, 
"Type=notify" which means that it's only a notification service.

$ systemctl --user list-dependencies --reverse snapd.session-agent.service

shows that there are no reverse dependencies on the service, i.e. no 
other services depends on snapd.session-agent.service to function so 
disabling it won't affect any other processes.

It also won't affect the notification ability of other snap 
applications. I've got Telegram, Thunderbird, Element, Spotify and other 
snaps installed and none are affected by disabling the session-agent 
service. Their notifications all still work.

> 
> Thanks much for these extra ideas! Would be nice to just get it to
> stop. :-)

No probs. It should be noted that there is a solution to this annoying 
behavior currently being tested. So hopefully, if all goes well, it can 
be pushed to the stable channel - thus all snap users - soon.

-- 
Keith