Disable Ubuntu Pro marketing on APT updates

Last years Ubuntu has started to do marketing of Pro features on command line 🙁

$ sudo apt dist-upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
Get more security updates through Ubuntu Pro with 'esm-apps' enabled:
  libiperf0 libjs-jquery-ui ansible python3-scipy iperf3
Learn more about Ubuntu Pro at https://ubuntu.com/pro
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

One way

This behaviour is configured via APT config file: /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20apt-esm-hook.conf

So if we want to disable we need to delete it or just change its extension (more reversible):

sudo mv /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20apt-esm-hook.conf /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20apt-esm-hook.conf.bak

Another way

It seems previous way is overridden on big OS updates… so it could be also disabled by commenting the lines on this file: /var/lib/ubuntu-advantage/apt-esm/etc/apt/sources.list.d/ubuntu-esm-apps.list, just comment all lines on the file with # characters:

# Written by ubuntu-advantage-tools

# deb https://esm.ubuntu.com/apps/ubuntu jammy-apps-security main
# deb-src https://esm.ubuntu.com/apps/ubuntu jammy-apps-security main

# deb https://esm.ubuntu.com/apps/ubuntu jammy-apps-updates main
# deb-src https://esm.ubuntu.com/apps/ubuntu jammy-apps-updates main

References:

• How to turn off ESM nag in every update?

Third way

Remove ubuntu-pro-client package:

sudo apt remove ubuntu-pro-client

Testing again

Now if we update again all is fine (as it always should be):

$ sudo apt dist-upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.