Disable ALL Notification sounds

Occasionally, I hear a very annoying notification sound. I don’t know all the places it occurs, and I usually just learn to avoid whatever is causing it.

Newest find: Hitting the Escape-key in gimp. That’s it. Open gimp, hit Escape, notification plays.

Ideally, just going to System Settings → Sound, and muting “Notification Sounds”, should mute all notification sounds. No matter where they come from. So I consider this a bug.

In System Settings → Colors & Themes → System Sounds, “Enable notification sounds” is unchecked and the tiles below that are grey.

In System Settings → Notifications, there isn’t anything about sounds initially, but it features two sub-menus:

  • System Notifications: All the speaker symbols are grey, so there shouldn’t be any sound
  • Application Settings: gimp isn’t even on the list, but I clicked through all of them and have found exactly one speaker symbol that’s not grey, but black, and that’s some alarm that I figured might be a good idea to keep as-is, if only to see how it looks like if a sound is enabled (I never hear that alarm sound).

Any ideas where else I can look?

System sounds not-muted, even though I have them set to muted

Disable pcspkr kernel module that creates error beep alerts

sudo rmmod pcspkr

And create a blacklist entry to prevent udev loading it at boot

sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/nobeep.conf <<< 'blacklist pcspkr'

Disable PC speaker - ArchWiki

2 Likes

How about the system bell? Assuming that this is KDE Plasma:

System Settings > Accessibility > System Bell > Audible bell (uncheck)

It was the bell. Thanks!