Comment 222 for bug 332945

It would be helpful, I think, if people could try not to use "devs" or "developers" here as if all the Ubuntu developers got together and decided this. The notify-osd system was designed and implemented by Canonical and they should get the credit/flames for it. Developers are also users and in this case there are many developers who are for the change and many who are against it. Lumping them all together is perhaps a bit of a disservice to people who had nothing to do with the change.

Regarding Alan's "vocal minority" statement. While he was perhaps a bit to concise for a heated topic, he has a fairly good point. We can't take this bug report (19 dups and 221 comments now) as solid proof that the majority of users don't like the changes. The big reason is that only people who don't like the change are going to file a bug about it so we're specifically collecting the "no" votes without really any collection of the "yes" votes. That makes things like this bug report not very useful for knowing just how many people are in favor of the new system. Statistically, 221 "no" votes is a distinct minority of users and so the claim that "a feature everybody dislikes" is probably not very valid. That is not to say however, that all the "no" votes are irrelevant or not considerable.

At this stage of the game we're about 2 months too late to do anything about this for Jaunty. Bottom line, this is the way it is for Jaunty. I filed bug #338501 about a month ago to get simple notifications of updates as they were detected but it didn't make it for Jaunty. There are a lot of bugs to fix and with only a limited amount of time it's hard to get to them all.

So I think it would really help if people got away from this bug report to more constructive places to discuss the notify-osd design as we look ahead to Karmic Koala. As I've already pointed out, https://lists.canonical.com/mailman/listinfo/ayatana-project is a good spot.