How to disable qubes icon-sender

User Support
1

there are some qubes where i don’t want any icons, like sys-net, i don’t ever touch or use them and they are unappealing.

the easiest way is to killall icon-sender, how can i instead make it never start and send the icon to dom0?

2

The icon-sender is started from /etc/xdg/autostart/qubes-icon-sender.desktop.
You can disable it by creating overriding .desktop file in the sys-net qube if it’s app qube or in the disposable template of sys-net qube if your sys-net qube is disposable:

mkdir ~/.config/autostart
cat << 'EOF' | sudo tee ~/.config/autostart/qubes-icon-sender.desktop >/dev/null
[Desktop Entry]
Hidden=true
EOF
3

Templates are generally where icons are received from, when new applications are installed. Sure, you can disable this behavior, but then you risk not having icons foor any other VM based on the template.

My recommended approach rather than stopping this behavior is just going to sys-net’s settings (applications tab) and remove all selected all applications. Sure, the icons with still technically be in dom0. But out of sight out of mind :person_shrugging: .