Comment 162 for bug 332945

Op woensdag 08-04-2009 om 19:55 uur [tijdzone +0000], schreef Mark
Shuttleworth:
> I think the system tray is heavily overused, and abused, by many
> applications, and as part of our design initiative we are working to
> reduce that.

First of all, it's not called the "system tray", but the "notification
area", and I quite like its existence (although I agree that some
applications use it for the wrong reasons).

The problem discussed in this bug report is that you try to "clean it
up" by removing the one application that has the best reason ever to
show notifications. That's worse than "throwing away the baby with the
bathwater", it's "throwing away the baby and keeping the bathwater".

Anyway, the UI design team said that the reason to pop up (or pop under,
or pop minimized, or whatever) update-manager is that some people didn't
see or didn't understand the icons in the notification area. And I
believe that's true for some people, and *should* be fixed, because we
want everybody to install at least all the security fixes.

Now, if you want to fix that problem, you try to find a way to target
those people, without disturbing how other people work with Ubuntu. One
way to do that is by detecting people who didn't install security fixes
after a reasonable time (let's say: after 3 days). I think it's
actually a good idea to pop up update-manager for these people, because
they clearly need it.

But of course, attentive users need a way to see if updates are
available and that's what we need the notification area for; otherwise
all of us are destined to be treated as "clueless newbies"...

And yes I know about the gconf key, but if gconf keys become the
solution to get Ubuntu to behave in a sane way, then Ubuntu is doing
something seriously wrong in the usability area (I'm sure MPT will agree
with that ;) ). Never ever forget that medium to very experienced users
are Ubuntu users too, so "user-friendly" has to apply to them too!

--
Jan Claeys