Disable Keyring – How to Disable Keyring for SSH and GPG

The default keyring manager for GNOME is seahorse:

Seahorse is a front end for GnuPG — the Gnu Privacy Guard program — that integrates to the GNOME desktop. It is a tool for secure communications and data storage. Data encryption and digital signature creation can easily be performed through a GUI and Key Management operations can easily be carried out through an intuitive interface.

(man 1 seahorse)

It should be enabled/running by default in Ubuntu and you should have this variable in your environment:

$ echo $GPG_AGENT_INFO
/tmp/keyring-XXXXXX/gpg:0:1

/tmp/keyring-XXXXXX/gpg is a socket bound by the program gnome-keyring-daemon, which is found in the gnome-keyring package.

Unfortunately, I don't have enough information about your system and I cannot tell you how to proceed exactly. However I should have given you enough information to start investigating the problem. If you need more help, please tell me whether you have the package installed, whether the process is running, whether the socket exists and whether the environment variable is set.

Just copy the relevant .desktop file from /etc/xdg/autostart to ~/.config/autostart and add Hidden=true to it:

(cat /etc/xdg/autostart/gnome-keyring-ssh.desktop; echo Hidden=true) > ~/.config/autostart/gnome-keyring-ssh.desktop

then reload gnome-shell (press Alt + F2, then type r and press Enter).

This is the only user-friendly solution that has worked for me (ie not having to softlink the .desktop file to /dev/null or chmod 0 the gnome-keyring-daemon). In fact, softlinking to /dev/null stopped working for me in GNOME 3.16.

Credit goes to nus.