If update notifications have stopped showing up on your Ubuntu 26.04 LTS install, that isn't some random glitch. OMG Ubuntu's Joey Sneddon has traced it back to a Launchpad bug report and a Discourse thread that both point to the same root cause.The issue is that update-notifier only sends a desktop notification when its tray icon is visible, and that icon was switched off in Ubuntu 26.04, with nothing in the Settings menu to switch it back on.Guillaume Michaud, who filed the bug on July 5, found 10 pending non-security updates sitting on his machine without a single prompt to install them. He tested it manually. With the tray icon forced on, update-notifier fired a notification, and with it switched off, nothing happened at all.Canonical's Marco Trevisan had flagged a related problem himself back in April, when the update indicator wasn't obeying its own settings and couldn't be switched on even manually.That got fixed within a day, but the icon stayed off by default. Commenting on the bug again in June, Marco called the setup a design choice and said anyone who wants the icon back can enable it through gsettings.However, this sounds worse than it actually is. 😅Ubuntu still runs unattended-upgrades in the background by default, so security patches keep installing themselves whether a notification ever appears. The actual gap was in non-security updates, the kind you'd normally want to review yourself, going completely unflagged.The fixAlessandro Astone has already shipped update-notifier 3.207.2 as a security update cleared for Ubuntu 26.04.1. It removes the tray icon dependency entirely. Now, an App Center install, an unattended-upgrades run, or a manual check all trigger the same notification.And because it went out as a security update, the fix reaches most systems automatically thanks to unattended-upgrades.If you'd rather have the tray icon back, open a terminal and run:gsettings set com.ubuntu.update-notifier show-updates-status-icon true Or just check your update status directly through App Center's "Manage" tab, the Software Updater, or simply run:apt list --upgradableSuggested Read 📖: GNOME's Security Might Be in Peril as Lone Tracker Goes Off