The next Ubuntu release (9.04, “Jaunty Jackalope”) will see the first set of changes introduced by Canonical’s Desktop Experience Team: The much-discussed notify-osd notification system, and the indicator applet.
While we have worked, and will continue to work with upstreams to get those into official GNOME, this will take a while; those are design/usability experiments, and their full impact and consequences are still to be determined by a large user base, and GNOME rightfully applies their own scrutiny on new things to adopt.
Thus the idea came up to allow both developers and users to be able to choose between the “Ubuntuized” and a more “upstream-like” GNOME experience.
I called that “stracciatella GNOME session”, after the favourite kind of ice cream which is mostly vanilla (GNOME), but with some brown chocolate chips (Ubuntu modifications) in it. Providing a pure “vanilla” GNOME session is currently beyond feasibility, use jh-build if you want to work on pure GNOME.
To enable this feature, apt-get install gnome-stracciatella-session and select the “GNOME (without Ubuntu specific components)” session in gdm.
In Jaunty, this will suppress the messaging indicator and flip back to the classical GNOME notification-daemon again. I plan to keep stracciatella-session up to date with new developments in future Ubuntu releases as well.
#1 by jef spaleta on 2009/02/23 - 19:19
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I’d like to point out that its good to see that the application specific patches to bring applications into notification spec compliance have started to be submitted flow back upstream into project trunk branches well before Jaunty’s release. Not just thrown over the wall as a set of patches buried in Canonical’s bzr trees.
Canonical hasn’t done such a good job at upstream patch submission in the past, so its good to see it happening in a timely manner this time, especially since this effort impacts so many individual applications and not just one or two components.
-jef
#2 by Vadim P. on 2009/02/23 - 20:47
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Seems like Fedora hasn’t come up with a good Code of Conduct for it’s members either.
#3 by jcastro on 2009/02/23 - 20:49
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Jef,
I am interested in collecting data on “Canonical hasn’t done such a good job at upstream patch submission in the past”, please point out specific patches where you feel this hasn’t been done well.
#4 by Christian Kellner on 2009/02/23 - 21:33
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“I called that “stracciatella GNOME session”, after the favourite kind of ice cream which is mostly vanilla (GNOME), but with some brown chocolate chips (Ubuntu modifications) in it.”
Totally awesome! (-:
#5 by martinpitt on 2009/02/24 - 01:19
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> Seems like Fedora hasn’t come up with a good Code of Conduct for it’s members either.
Hm? I actually considered Jef’s post as a commendation.
#6 by Mathias Hasselmann on 2009/02/24 - 01:39
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This idea of showing the entire application, or error messages instead of a notification bubble with buttons is that intrusive and broken that it hurts.
Seems it is time to look for some other distribution.
I already hate 9.04 when just imagining this idiocy.
#7 by jef spaleta on 2009/02/24 - 02:34
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Martin,
Indeed it’s my intent to follow up with a word of support for doing a good job at upstreaming relevant patches early as a way of fairly balancing my criticism of how the fusa patches against the dead gdm tree was handled in Ubuntu 8.20 release run-up, or how the Canonical sponsored BBC totem plugin wasn’t submitted to upstream until October-10, very late in the Ubuntu 8.10 release process.
The impact of the notification work you are doing is pretty far reaching in terms of the number of applications affected. If you dropped the patches into place late into Ubuntu late into the release cycle and without some amount of upstream review that would really come back to bite you in terms of upstream development relationships, especially because what you are doing with notifications is somewhat controversial even if the individual application patches themselves are clean-ups of specification compliance.
-jef
#8 by foo on 2009/02/24 - 05:21
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Why don’t you do things upstream first and then pull them into Ubuntu? There would be no need for Ubuntu-specific things.
#9 by Vadim P. on 2009/02/24 - 06:22
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@martinpitt: It would have been fine, if he didn’t repeat this point on every a major portion Ubuntu-development-related posts. It gets quite annoying reading the same – at this point, bickering – over and over again.
@foo: you forgot the “upload to Debian” part this time.
#10 by martinpitt on 2009/02/24 - 09:15
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@foo: But we *are* upstream for notify-osd, libindicate, indicator-applet, etc. They are all on Launchpad, with upstream branches and releases, and so on.
These new systems have been discussed with upstream long before, too, and we are immediately sending patches to them. We can’t work “more” upstream, since (1) we do not have so many upstream commiters, and (2) we are experimenting here and actually need to collect some feedback first. We wrote a long rationale for the changes at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotifyOSD, but that doesn’t mean that everyone immediately agrees. To the contrary, we are still heavily disputing some issues, such as how to handle update-manager.
#11 by martinpitt on 2009/02/24 - 09:16
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Sorry, I meant https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotificationDesignGuidelines
#12 by Luca on 2009/03/31 - 12:28
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Hi Martin,
I’m using gnome-stracciatella-session on Jaunty and since my last update this morning I now see the new notifications (i.e. at login, from Network Manager). Do you know anything about this new behavior? Thanks.
#13 by martinpitt on 2009/03/31 - 12:35
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I didn’t notice that yet, no. I’ll investigate.
#14 by Luca on 2009/03/31 - 13:03
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Thank you Martin. It seems that now I have notify-osd running, even with gnome-stracciatella-session. Killing its process and manually launching /usr/lib/notification-daemon/notification-daemon solved the issue (tested with notify-send). The only problem is that I have to do this manually at every startup
#15 by Luca on 2009/04/01 - 12:54
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From this morning updates (not yet tested):
Version 0.9.7-0ubuntu2:
* Reupload, previous upload dropped Ubuntu patches, causing
stracciatella-session to use notify-osd instead of notification-daemon.
#16 by darkweasel on 2009/04/03 - 19:38
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what other things than the update manager thing does this change?
#17 by martinpitt on 2009/04/05 - 04:12
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As I wrote, right now it restores the original notifications and suppresses the messaging indicator.
#18 by Erick Brunzell on 2009/04/06 - 18:17
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Thank you much for this! Along with re-enabling the old System Tray icon as detailed here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1095928&page=3
Result is a much more pleasant experience, largely because I’ am visually impaired!
One of the greatest things about Ubuntu is the ability to change things to make it “just work for you”! Love it!
#19 by Simon on 2009/04/25 - 15:59
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Thanks a lot for this!
Long time Ubuntu user (previously on Debian), I use Ubuntu simply because I enjoy a GNOME desktop that is well-packaged, recent, and well-supported by 3rd parties. In fact I would probably still be using Debian if 3 or 4 years ago I had have a CD handy when my harddrive crashed
. Still I have been pleasantly surprised by Ubuntu’s evolution so far and here I was, installing Jaunty with no idea of what was new.
So I have installed Jaunty two days ago only to discover the horror that is notify-osd and the indicator applet. I’m sorry, because I agree that the goal is laudable, yet under the premise of improving ergonomics the desktop-team made things way, way worse. For instance, I use a GNOME panel at the bottom of my screen (no top panel) and the notifications appear top right. This is how it is specced. I don’t like the notification theme and it’s not themable. This is how it is specced again. I enjoy clicking a Gajim notification to open the chat window. Truly, not the paradigm I’m comfortable with, and from what I’ve read so far most share my opinion (even if I see that it will be enforced even if everyone complain, until people get “used to it anyway”. Isn’t that how Windows lockin works?
). So I ended up removing notify-osd altogether, but then I had no more notifications, and I kinda like them (knowing what song is playing, receiving a message, new updates [reverted the behavior here too), etc).
So I was considering going back to Debian — not to get back notifications, but simply because I like vanilla GNOME. What I like in Ubuntu so far is the packaging, and the fact that most third parties provide a deb archive that requires Ubuntu dependencies (often outdated when running Debian stable, and I don’t like to be bothered with installing new software, I want something that just works).
Yet I am lazy, and truly satisfied with the rest of Jaunty.
I write this long message as a user story for notify-osd. The conclusion for this user story is: Thanks for providing gnome-stracciatella-session, and please, please, keep it working for future upgrades. Ubuntu works well because it has working governance system, but it doesn’t mean that the choices are always right; or that there is a right choice considering the size and variety of the userbase.
#20 by Steve Dodier on 2009/04/27 - 11:08
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Heya,
Although I understand your situation, I still think notify-osd’s behaviour is a wonderful thing. In fact, I was just sick of receiving notifications from my IM client that would not close until I clicked them, and that then would open a window (unless i target the little cross in the top right of the notification). Also, I was getting spammed sometimes, when several persons were talking to me at the same time, receiving emails, etc.
I must say I’m very pleased now that notifications just stay on their ‘corner’ and don’t invade my screen anymore, aswell as the fact that they never break my workflow (for instance, when coding, if there’s a top right notification, I still can click on the right tabs of my text editor, which I couldn’t before).
Now, about the case of the lost actions. I think there are two case of actions that are actually important : asking the user to make a choice *now* (that’s why we notify him that he has to choose, because we need him to choose). Popups do this just as well as notifications, and it isn’t the goal of a notification.
The other kind of action, the one that you were using, is an action that consists of providing the user with a ‘shortcut’ to the window he’s very likely to open after having been notified. Why not have the applications just make their title blink in the ‘window bar’ in the panel ? This way, the user knows he has something to read on this very window, and he can aswell ignore it without it to disturb his workflow as much as invading notifications.
#21 by Simon on 2009/05/01 - 01:58
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As a matter of fact, I find blinking far more invasive than notifications. It might not use screen space, but in my opinion it takes “user attention” and this is often bad. I am not really satisfied with GNOME with that regard (or maybe there is an option in Gconf to reduce the blinking speed/ lessen the graphical effects, because bold+blinking is too much for me
).
I’m sure there is a better solution lying around
.
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#22 by Miguel_ab on 2009/05/24 - 20:35
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Hi Martin!
I’ve just updated to 9.04 from 8.10 (32bit) and I don’t like notify-osd because when I receive an email in Evolution I like a notification and also I like that an icon remains in the system tray and with notify-osd… yes, I receive the notification but any icon remains in the the system tray indicating new mail
I work with dual monitor and virtual desktops so for me is very useful to have this function of that an icon indicates that there are unread emails.
At the end, I’ve tried the stracciatella-gnome-session and all come back to work perfectly
If the Ubuntu’s message is freedom… ¿why in 9.04 version they obligate all people to use notify-osd and also they don’t allow to configure it? ¿Why they think that I like notify-osd and also that notify-osd must appears in the up-right corner (I did’nt find any way to change this)?
Thank you very much for the ice-cream
Greetings
Miguel
#23 by Watch Year One Online Free on 2009/06/20 - 22:01
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I follow your posts for quite a long time and should tell that your posts are always valuable to readers.
p.s. Year One is already on the Internet and you can watch it for free.