Comment 98 for bug 438536

Adrian: Nothing's stopping you. Growl is BSD, so go ahead and port it to Linux, I'm sure lots of people will be glad you did. But Notify-OSD's purpose is not to be just like Growl, it's supposed to be an out-of-the-way, simple notification system, no bells and whistles. While I strongly urge Mr. Shuttleworth to allow basic customization of Notify-OSD, theming and the likes, but the ability to trick out every little thing is exactly what brings less stability and more bugs. Look at Compiz. It generally works quite well, but there are acres and acres of problems and little bugs that keep occurring with the WM. Fullscreen flash was broken from it for a while last year, there's been a long-running problem with full-screen applications that was just partially solved a month ago, and there's even the irritating bug concerning tooltips that don't go away when you switch desktops with the workspace switcher. That last one has been around since Jaunty, and there's only a dirty hack to get rid of it at the moment. There are lots of little things that have been around that just aren't being fixed because there's not enough manpower.

Why should Canonical have to spend that many more resources on making sure that the custom themes, click-ability or invisibility work all perfect when they could spend the time working on the core system? If someone really wants to go nuts with customization, by all means, fork it. That's what's great about free software. But Canonical isn't terribly large and they can't keep up with everything.

There's a debatable line on what should be customizable and what shouldn't; I STRONGLY feel like we should get options for screen position and behavior (the async/sync nonsense). Whether they go beyond this or not, it's their choice, but I sincerely feel that they shouldn't do this. This is why I still use GNOME, despite the constant idiocy and sophistry that they employ in their "features". They allow customization as much as they can with a guarantee of stability. KDE is wonderful with allowing this customization, but KDE4 has had a track record of being extremely buggy and unstable (I know it's gotten much better now, but it took quite a while to pick themselves back up: Even Linus ditched it for GNOME for a while!).

(Also, for the record, my praise for GNOME halts at Gnome shell. That lunacy will be the catalyst that will drive me to XFCE).