How do I disable notification centre in Big Sur?

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Level 1

5 points

How do I disable notification centre in Big Sur?

Reposting a question from January:

How do I completely and permanently disable the notification centre in Big Sur (on an M1 macbook Air)?

I went to System Preferences -> Notifications and turned off "Allow Notifications" for each app, but doesn't help, because built-in apps, like Safari, simply aren't listed so it's impossible to turn notifications off.

I also set "Turn on Do Not Disturb" from 2:01am to 2:00am in the hopes of disabling notifications, but still I find some notifications!!! Obviously this Do not disturb feature is broken or maybe at 2:00am the notifications are popping up and then remaining for me to see in the morning, not sure.

In some previous Mac OS X versions, I used this:

launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.notificationcenterui.plist

However, with Big Sur I'm getting:

Unload failed: 5: Input/output error

I have tried all kinds of other launchctl commands, but I'm afraid I can't figure out what to run even after running man page, which unfortunately doesn't list any launchctl usage examples.

Please don't tell me just to click the icon. I don't want notifications AT ALL - the screen is littered with them from the moment of login.

MacBook Air

Posted on Mar 29, 2021 9:50 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Tuffy Nicolas

Level 2

272 points

Mar 29, 2021 11:57 AM in response to lalochezia

I had a similar problem which I got answered today. This is what I did, which may work for you too:

-- Click on the time/date in the menu bar (upper right corner of your screen), then the "Notification Center" popup window emerges from the right side of your screen. Hold down the Option key and hover it over each notification bubble; as you do so, a "minus" symbol will appear in the upper left corner of each bubble -- click the minus symbol to remove that notification bubble. This works for about 90% of the notification bubbles in Notification Center, but not all of them.

-- Next, go to System Preferences>Notifications, then slide the "Allow Notifications" slider to "On," once it's on, then Uncheck all the options, such as "Show notifications on lock screen," etc., and "Show previews>Never," etc. The one by one uncheck every single application in the list on the left side. Finally (and most importantly), then go back to the Allow Notifications" slider and turn it "Off."

-- Go back to th Notification Center by clicking the date in the menu bar again; if you still have one or more notification bubbles, then click the "Edit Widgets" button at the button, and in the window that pops up try to turn off the remaining bubbles.

By trying all these steps, I was eventually able to turn off ALL notifications in Big Sur 10.2.3. Hope it works for you too.

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Answer 2

Mar 29, 2021 11:25 AM in response to lalochezia

While I understand you may not want notifications, what I don't understand is how, if you turned them basically all off, you get the screen littered with them. What applications are the notifications that you still get coming from? That may help figuring out a way to get rid of them.

Also: Safari is listed... and so is Mail, FaceTime,... and you can turn everything off for all of them.

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How do I disable notification centre in Big Sur?

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